I really liked this book's vibe. I've been branching out and I'm really enjoying sci fi horror type books. I think I'm going to try Annihilation and that series later as well.
I really enjoyed the vibe of it, of it being just two characters alone in a cave, one of them climbing, and the other one far away on computers assisting. The moment when Gyre couldn't reopen the connection and was completely cut off was like, Soul grippingly terrifying.
Apart from the atmosphere, I was kind of disappointed. The plot felt weak, like Em's reason to keep the mission going for so many years didn't feel strong enough. I'm still undecided as to whether the constant going in circles of the actual story was a deliberate move to make the reader feel as exhausted and uncomfortable as Gyre did, or whether the story structure is just in general weak.
I did both enjoy and not enjoy the sort of mystery it's left as. I really like when books don't handfeed you the story and the story the author told about the other cavers without actually telling you anything really was really masterful. I just feel with how thin the plot was that Something had paid off concretely. It would have felt a little better, then.
But the author has major skill in their suspense writing, and I really want to read some of their other work because their way of creating atmosphere is so good.