The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea

INTRODUCTION

I grew up loving the ocean. My family went to New York’s Rockaway Beach for many summers when I was a child and through my teenage years. I loved the beach, lying on the sand, baking in the sun (pre-cancer scares) with my friends, the smell of the tar in the parking lots—and of the ocean—and body surfing in the waves. I also went fishing with my dad (in lakes and ponds), and even went on a deep-sea fishing trip with a friend in my early twenties (we caught nothing).

But in 1975, something happened. I went to see Jaws. It scared me so badly that I had a difficult time going into the ocean after that. For a (very) brief time, I was even fearful of lakes and swimming pools. Then, in 1977, The Last Wave was released, about the end of the world heralded by a tsunami on a coast of Australia. Those two movies made me realize that the sea and the simple act of swimming in it could be frightening, even terrifying.

We, like all other forms of life, come from the sea, and yet we’re intimidated by it. Why? One reason could be that the seas are more vast on our planet than the land we live on, and 95 percent of the sea is still unexplored. It’s a natural human tendency to fear the unknown, and our relative ignorance about the sea fosters superstitions, myths, and legends about it and what might inhabit it (sirens, sea monsters, forms of organic life that we can’t even begin to comprehend because the conditions in which they flourish are inimical to human life). H. P. Lovecraft populated the spaces between universes with extra-dimensional monsters, but he also populated the sea with them in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a story that serves as a touchstone for a lot of horror fiction written since. Lovecraft, like numerous other writers (William Hope Hodgson in particular), saw in the vastness and alienness of the sea the same potential for horror that has persuaded writers since the dawn of the tale of horror to infest the dark with monsters and boogeymen. The sea is a watery terra incognita, a huge blank canvas that invites writers to imagine horrors onto it.

But, come on. In reality it’s only water, so why should we fear large bodies of it? Well, those sharks, especially the Great White—a predator’s dream, a swimmer or surfer’s nightmare. Also, those mysteries in the deep blue sea—awful mysteries like eons-old fish that shouldn’t exist today but apparently do. Then there are fish like the dragonfish, with its big teeth and hideous face and the black seadevil, with sharp teeth, both found in the deeps of the Mariana Trench.

Another aspect of what makes the sea so horrifying: it seems hostile to us (although, really, it’s as indifferent to human existence as Lovecraft’s monsters are). We’re of it, but we can’t live in it. One can drown in a minimal amount of water, but it’s more likely that a riptide will drag unwary swimmers out to sea, or you might just develop a cramp, preventing you from getting back to shore with no lifeguard to save you.

We build ships to sail upon the ocean, deluding ourselves that we can master it, but shipwrecks prove that some of our sturdiest inventions are at the mercy of the sea. People (and sometimes vessels) lost at sea are often never found: the sea is like a vast ravening maw that can swallow us in one bite.

Remaining on shore is no guarantee of safety, either. If we stray too near the sea, it can pull us from our safe haven on land (sort of like the monster under the bed reaching up to grab us). And we’ve all witnessed the damage tsunamis can wreak on shorelines around the world, killing thousands. There’s a lot of talk about global warming these days, and the consequence: rising sea levels. As the sea encroaches on the world that we’ve built for ourselves, it has the potential to sweep away everything that human progress and civilization have created—everything that our species stands for. The sea coughed us up, but some day it’s going to reclaim us, and there’s precious little that we can do about it. We are puny. It is monstrously vast and overwhelming. It makes us realize that, on our planet, we are only temporary, while the sea is permanent.

The stories in The Devil and the Deep cover a range of aspects of the sea and the shores around it, from obvious monsters to the mysterious; there are tales of shipwrecks, haunts, monsters—human and inhuman—one story even taking place on what was once an inland sea, long gone. All these tales have been conjured up from the imaginations of the fifteen contributors. Each is basically about people, and how they deal with the mysterious entity surrounding us.