Mark Morris marries an large-scale, Irwin Allen-style disaster tale with his usual brand of dark fantasy in THE DELUGE. For those without meteorology degrees, the title means a large flood, and Morris doesn’t take that definition lightly.
You don’t have to wait for the tsunami-like waves to hit, either. By page 1, all of London is engulfed, and only those atop the highest of the high-rises survive. The rest instantly become bloated, waterlogged corpses through which the survivors will have to wade through once the flood recedes. To Morris’ credit, that doesn’t take long at all, either; the waters go away as unexpectedly as they arrived.
Left behind by the suddenly tragedy is a varied lot: a teenage daughter and her single father; a black youth and his brother who just had narrowly avoided death by skinhead beating; an old couple, the husband of which is confined to a wheelchair; a female cop; a pediatrician; and a guy who’s not above having sex with carcasses.
As they make their way through the city in search of a more habitable future, these people eventually converge, and band together – a good thing, considering what they’ll come up against. And the kids armed with crossbows are the least of their problems. I’ll leave you to discover just what that is; needless to say, that’s where the fantasy aspect kicks in. Although allusions are made earlier, it really doesn’t show itself until about halfway in, so you may be caught off-guard after being so immersed in the survival story, which resembles a post-apocalypse zombie plot without the zombies.
Morris has two levels of horror working here: the real and the unreal, and for me, it’s the former which works the best. World events of the past few years have reminded us that water is indeed a great enemy, no matter how landlocked you think you may be. The latter is merely escape, and since it reminded me of THE THING, that’s all for the better.
Even if THE DELUGE is a little too long, it’s a big improvement over Morris’ previous effort for Leisure, THE IMMACULATE, which I couldn’t get into at all. –Rod Lott
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