Well... this book took me almost a month to finish it. That really doesn't look good...

To begin with The Black is about a crew on the exploration rig Leaguer with the one task to drill for oil underneath the sea floor. After their first drilling they find something that looks like oil but it isn't. So there starts the real plot.

There are many reasons for my one star review: First of all I never grew attached to the characters. Sometimes they are mentioned by their last name, sometimes by their first name. The perspective doesn't matter. So the first 30% of the book I struggled to find out which first name and last name belonged together. It didn't help that even characters refered to other characters sometimes by their last name and other times by the first name.
After this part there was the first drilling part, really unspectacular. The action starts after the first drilling, mere 50% in the book. So I thought, well, okay, I will read through this, it might still be good in the end. But no, I never read a book where the mystic and dangerous creature (or what to call it) is so boring. I didn't matter to me if it killed anybody or how it did that. The atmosphere where the peolpe are trapped on board the rig and are desperate, sadly never got to me.

This one has been on my TBR list for quite some time and I’m glad to have finally gotten to it.

Overall this was an interesting thriller, I loved the tech they used throughout the story, and learned a lot of oil rig/ rough-neck jargon.

The characters were fairly likeable, but you couldn’t get too attached to any of them, as after the halfway point, they start dropping like flies.

Plot-wise, I feel there are a few oil rig thrillers out there already (I’d recommend Slimer if you’re looking for another), but the writing and thrills in this novel felt unique.

I’m interested in reading the second novel, but it’s not a “must” for me, as I feel like I’ve gotten a decent dose of “The Black” from the first book.

I love sea monsters so this one drew me in. The pacing is a little wonky, slow going at first learning about rig operations then ramping up to can't-put-down reading until a kind of abrupt ending. This is pretty comparable to The Thing, someone who enjoyed that would probably enjoy this on the same level. The only minor thing that bothered me is characters are referred to by both their first names or their last names at times which made it confusing in the end who was actually who

Spoiler

basically when the 'roughnecks' who were left started dying, I had no idea who they were talking about at times which maybe made the deaths less impactful

.

Not sure if I'll read the two parallel stories in the series, but this was an enjoyable read that kept me interested and eager to read more.

I'm a sucker for deep sea thrillers. The Black works fairly well as a techno thriller in the tradition on Michael Crichton. I like when books explain scientific processes the way Crichton did. That said, Crichton had a gift for it I've never seen matched. He would hold nothing back in his descriptions and meticulously research and document in bibliography format in his novels. Heck, I distinctly remember trying to figure out if The Andromeda Strain was based on actual events because of Crichton's bibliography and apparent research.

Paul Cooley does the Crichtonesque elements fairly well. There's nothing too scientific aside from the workings of deep sea oil rigs, but his descriptions worked for me. The slow buildup to the big reveal also worked well for me.

The finale didn't really keep my attention well. The showdown with the creature wasn't anything special. There is a sequel that isn't actually a sequel but a separate novel about what happened in the lab with the sample and it takes place concurrent to The Black.

I enjoyed Cooley's style and he has the creepy build-up down. The rest of the story isn't as polished but I could see myself reading more of his work in the future.

One thing that annoyed me, and others have written about this too: for some reason the author arbitrarily shifts back & forth between referring to characters by their last names & first names. That was beyond obnoxious because half the time I would have to just guess which character he was referring to. Many of the characters' last names are never revealed when they are introduced, but later on he refers to them by the last name he created for them and never shared with us, only to shift back to first names later for no reason whatsoever. Then back again and so on.

Beyond that, The Black showed great promise and a very interesting slow build up.

First, the negatives, just to get them out of the way.

The characters are bland and unlikable. They all feel like cookie cutter stereotypes; with no real personality. The hard working immigrant foreman. The money driven businessman. The antisocial IT guy. The beautiful but nerdy female lead. And so on. It actually made it a bit difficult to follow the story at times, as you'd confuse characters with one another.

Enough about the negatives though, let's focus on the positives.

The author did an amazing job of setting the atmosphere. You could feel the claustrophobic emptiness of the ocean whenever he did a deep water scene. The stark terror of the characters when they were terrified. The ragged determination of the survivors to defeat the horror and survive.

And the monster? He took Lovecraftian horror in an entirely new direction. I absolutely loved it, and want to see a movie made out of this book.

From bad to worse? Hardly. After the disappointment that was [b:Pliosaur|26890959|Pliosaur (Vengeance from the Deep #1)|Russ Elliott|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1444277427l/26890959._SY75_.jpg|42847464], I wasn't expecting much from The Black. It was a victim of circumstances, I started reading it way back but I fell off the reading wagon and all books suffered for it. It probably didn't help that I had just read two monster books ([b:Into The Sounds|41088410|Into The Sounds (Taine McKenna Adventures #2)|Lee Murray|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1533900794l/41088410._SY75_.jpg|64198519] and [b:Black Mountain|15997608|Black Mountain (Alex Hunter, #4)|Greig Beck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347154983l/15997608._SY75_.jpg|20762887]) back to back either.

But in a rush to finish my reading challenge this year again, I decided to finish these two books off to move on to other reading projects. And I'm glad that I did, for sure.

The Black starts off exceedingly slow, setting the scene and building up to what turned out to be a fantastic finale. This is the slow horror build up of movies such as Alien or The Thing. But the gores is something akin to The Blob or Deep Rising with lots of people being painfully dissolved and limbs popping off. I realize that might be a bit of a spoiler but I write it so you know what you're more or less in for.
It's been a long time since a book grabbed me the same way The Black did. Like stated, it was a slow boil from the start and that can take some effort to get through. If you're not interested in oil rigs or have a technical mind, there's gonna be a lot of babble that go straight over your head. A lot of the technology used is detailed to a fault in some cases. If Cooley learned all this from a book and has never stepped foot on an oil rig, it's damn impressive to say the least. I've worked in a power plant and a lot of the techno babble was still straight over my head.

Luckily, once the going gets tough and the tough get going, it became damn near impossible to put it down. The excruciating detail put into the fate of the various inhabitants of the rig is fascinating but not for the faint of heart. If you learn to care for the characters, their fates can be quite difficult to read. Unfortunately the book does become a bit rushed towards the end. The book clocks in just under 240 pages but it's really in the last 40 that the most significant things start to happen. That, in itself, is not a bad thing but it seems Cooley had a smite too many ideas he needed to put in there. The fate of quite a few characters are wrapped up rather suddenly and then the book just sort of ends.

But that's me being overly negative. Truth is, I stayed up late to read it and I took the time out of my day to finish, which is rare for me, I almost never read during the day when I'm home. Only when I go to bed or wake up. I cannot wait to pick up the sequel and hope they maintain the same quality. It was a refreshing take on a fairly typical setup and Cooley pulls it off magnificently.