This Gilded Abyss is Rebecca Thorne’s F/F lovers-to-enemies(-to-lovers) letter to Bioshock—this isn’t me being snarky, the dedication is “For everyone who fought for their lives in Rapture.” In this case, the Rapture analogue is Fall, a domed city at the bottom of the ocean, only reachable by the immense submersible Luminosity at the end of a three day voyage. Sergeant Nix Marr swore that she would never make that journey again; the last time she went to Fall, her best friend died and her royal girlfriend threw her aside like she was nothing. Unfortunately, her ex-girlfriend is going back to investigate a mass murder, and she needs Nix’s help.
It has the structure of a great survival horror story! A completely closed environment, a deadline, a threat that could emerge anywhere at any time. And the sections talking about the mines—the cramped environments, the diving suits, the ghostly monster that haunts the mines and lures soldiers away to die—were such good set up! Acrimonious ex-girlfriends going through the events of Underwater or The Luminous Dead? Sign me up: I can’t imagine something that I would want to read more!
Unsurprisingly, This Gilded Abyss is great at highlighting the sheer excess of high society, and contrasting it with the lives of the lower classes who make that society run. The descriptions of the world, from the airy luxury of the upper classes to the cramped spaces of the lower, to the leviathan-fall? Gorgeous, fantastically done. Nix’s resentment balanced against the class warfare? Also great. The little character moments where you put the pieces together and realise what characters have been doing and the implications of their actions? Amazing. Any time the words “Little speck” appear, something chilling is about to happen. All of that is good.
My issue is that the pacing of threats feels off. Rivals are introduced, but don’t survive it to the next chapter. Friends are given the bare minimum needed that the audience can recognise their names, and then they’re gone. And after a certain point, the endless, unrelenting misery started to feel like a slog. There are no wins; or at least, any wins happen while Nix is knocked unconscious, so she can immediately move onto the next terrible thing happening. And I like survival horror! It is my comfort genre! It works better when you give the characters hope.
… Plus, if you tell me that the characters are going to have desperation sex because their lives are in danger, I am going to have questions about them having time to stop and plug in their steampunk magic wand for it.
Honestly, I think I would have enjoyed This Gilded Abyss more if the pace had been slower. The horror and action we got was good, and I was excited for the hints of political intrigue, but they didn’t get enough build up for me! If there’d been a little more time spent on them, I think it would have been better. The horror of Bioshock and Gilded Abyss is that anyone and everyone can be the danger to your protagonist; otherwise normal people losing their minds for reasons outside their control and becoming threats despite themselves is awful! And for me, the speed the book whizzes through problems means that it didn’t get to give any of them weight.
It’s entirely possible that my expectations are wrong; I expected a survival horror story with an F/F romance (again, like The Luminous Dead), so it was a little disappointing to me. If you go in expecting a character study or an enemies-to-lovers romance against a Bioshock-style backdrop, you’ll probably have a good time! … Now I need to find the sequel, because what the hell is going on in Fall?
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