Spoilers Ahoy!

From Below follows a group of amateur divers led by boss babe Cove. They’re making a documentary on the SS Arcadia: a ship that sank under mysterious circumstances. How or why they are the first humans allowed to explore this ship is not divulged, but que sera sera.

Coates does an excellent job describing the setting, the creepiness of the sunken ship, and the building unease the characters feel over the course of 4 dives.

The story itself goes back and forth between the present and the past aka a few weeks before the SS Arcadia sinks.

In the past, we follow some sailors who lack the spine to do anything about anything at any point during the story. The captain of the Arcadia is sailing at a breakneck pace for reasons unknown. The fog surrounding the SS Arcadia prevents anyone from seeing anything even during the day. There might be ships close to them, or not. They might be near land, or not. Who’s to say?

People are jumping overboard daily and develop a strange burrowing disease. The vibes are clearly whack, but not whack enough to compel anyone to pimp slap the captain and demand an explanation.

By the time someone has the brilliant idea to storm the bridge, the captain is dead and the ship is actively sinking. Why? How? Apparently, that was not important to Coates because the reason the ship sinks is never divulged.

Was it cursed? Haunted? Infected? Did a single corpse sealed inside the ship’s walls turn everyone into zombies? Alas! The world will never know.

In the present day, Cove, Roy, Aiden, Hestie, and Vanna are diving. The characters are all relatively well-written albeit stupid, particularly Aiden. Initially, I was rooting for Roy to die and my opinion did not change by the book’s end. However, much to my disappointment, nobody died at all.

Back to Aiden, he had no business on this dive, so I will give him a pass for his stupidity, since it’s established from the start that he’s going to be a problem. Even the SS Arcadia knows this, which is why it convinces him to return to it after their third dive where he nearly gets sacrificed to the underwater zombie gods for the second time.

On the first dive, several characters are spooked over basically nothing, which had me questioning the wisdom of a second dive. The second dive is where any normal person would’ve called it quits. They find corpses. Someone has a seizure. Someone gets a foot massage from a corpse.

However, they all return to the surface safely. Yet, Cove is like, “idk I think we need a third dive. Finding dead bodies and exploring a ship no one has explored before is not gonna be enough for *tv company* we need to go back.” Like babe, there will be zero footage if you sink with the ship.

The third dive is where the story fell apart for me. Rather than ditch Aiden, Cove lets him dive with the most experienced diver: Vanna.

Since there had to be a reason for him to wake up the underwater corpses, Shawn (who I had forgotten about) tasks Aiden, the most inexperienced and nervous diver, with collecting samples.

Speaking of the SS Arcadia, it is full of underwater zombies. These underwater zombies wake up and are like, “literally how dare you wake us from our eternal sleep, now you’re stuck with us,” and start dragging the characters down with the ship. Somehow, Aiden becomes the king of zombies, but is saved from becoming an underwater zombie by the power of friendship.

Everyone lives. Nobody dies. Aiden even gets his wedding ring back.

The writing in From Below is solid, and the plot is interesting and well-paced. The characters were decently written and likable, but their actions towards the book’s end grew increasingly questionable.

To be fair, I’m not a strong enough swimmer to even be on this dive, so contemplating whether I would’ve returned for Aiden or not is a moot point.

Nobody would’ve let me in the water to begin with, which is exactly what they should’ve done with Aiden: left him on the surface.

From Below Rating: 6.5/10