Time once again to delve into the Deep Trouble books. Feels interesting To follow up on this after almost 40 books. That didn't fare Say Cheese and Die very well. But this was one I do remember liking, and I warmed up to the original in this reread, so maybe things are looking up? We'll see as we enter Deep Trouble II.
DEEP TROUBLE II
RELEASE MONTH: August, 1997
FRONT TAGLINE: Something's fishy... again!
COVER STORY
Less scary than the more daunting scenario of the first Deep Trouble cover, yet the sequel's cover is still solid in its own right. A lot of that having to do with just how pretty the background is. Great details like the light shimmering through the water, the forest of coral and even the little touch of the skeleton of a sunken ship to add a little tinge of creepy. And then there's the giant goldfish which certainly looks freakish. All in all, while not the scariest, it's still effective.
THE FISH ARE BITING... EVERYONE!
Billy Deep and his sister Sheena are spending another summer in the Caribbean on their uncle's totally cool floating lab. The weather is beautiful. And there are lots of neat places to go swimming and snorkeling.
Billy and Sheena are great swimmers. But even great swimmers get into trouble—especially this year. This year there's something really scary going on under the sea. The fish all seem to be growing. Bigger and bigger. Into monster-sized sea creatures. With monster-sized appetites...
STORY
It's been a year since Billy Deep and his Sister Sheena were visiting their uncle Dr. George Deep (or Dr. D as the book refers to him) aboard his ship The Cassandra. Billy reminds us of his encounter with the mermaid and all the mayhem that befell that. Though he seems to forget to mention that whole monster thing at the end of that book. But that doesn't really matter as Billy's older, wiser, and just as over-imaginative, exemplified when he mistakes Sheena for an octopus and tickles her. He then decides to scare Sheena by pretending to be a shark, only to run into something that's as big as a shark.
He makes it aboard the Cassandra to tell Dr. D. about it, but he thinks it couldn't have been a shark. In fact, he knows what it could be. He takes the kids down to his lab to show them a minnow. A gigantic minnow. Though he has no idea what could be going on to turn these fish into giants. The kids are also still pranking each other as Sheena scares Billy with a rather large doll's head in a fish tank. The kids swim some more, only for Sheena to be nabbed by a gigantic jellyfish. Billy goes inside the jellyfish and manages to free her in time.
The kids return to the boat, only to find that Dr. D. has disappeared. They soon discover a giant sea snail on the boat and it's trapped Dr. D. under it's slimy skin. They manage to free him, only for the ship to get heavier. Turns out that Billy had some goldfish that have now become the size of small whales. They manage to get the fish off the boat when even more trouble rears its head. Three men have boarded the boat. One of the men introduces himself as Dr. Ritter and he introduces his heavies Mel Mason and Adam Brown. Turns out that the whole giant fish thing was Dr. Ritter's doing. He hasn't been doing much... except playing god!
Dr. Ritter had been injecting growth hormones into the plankton beds around the ocean. This plankton was eaten by the marine life which turned them gigantic. Your basic mad science "ending world hunger" thing. Ritter has Mason and Brown tie up the Deeps. Suddenly, the boat gets attacked by giant seagulls, giving the Deeps a chance to escape in a dinghy. After a tough night in the middle of the ocean they wind up ashore the next day. As they fish for food, they get attacked by a giant enemy crab. But no attacking its weak point for massive damage, they just avoid the crab until it goes back in the ocean.
Suddenly their lifeboat begins to float away on them. Luckily, dolphins help the Deeps make it back to the boat where Ritter awaits. Mason and Brown are no longer with him. Guessing they were killed offscreen by the giant seagulls? With the Deeps captured again, he shows them a bottle of his plankton and tells them that while the plankton can turn marine life giant, it has a different effect on humans. It can turn them into fish. He tries to force Billy to drink it, but nothing seems to happen. Frustrated, Dr. Ritter drinks the other bottle of plankton and turns into a fish, allowing him to escape. Billy then reveals that the bottle he drank was just iced tea. Another attempted prank on Sheena.
TWIST ENDING
Sheena then says that she too put iced tea in a bottle to trick Billy. However, once she drinks the bottle, Billy and Dr. D. realize she just drank the wrong bottle.
CONCLUSION
This book is still pretty good. And I think why is just how much action is in the book. It's almost nonstop. The scare with the shark-sized minnow, the jellyfish fight, the encounter with the snail and goldfish, the first encounter with Ritter, the ocean voyage, the giant crab then the finale with Ritter. There's not much time given to waste, which means a lot less of the regular tropes of fake out scares, though there are a few. It's almost all action and set pieces which means for a more memorable voyage than even the original provided. It does boil down to the whole "evils of science/anti-science" lean that Stine seems to go with a lot, but it works fine by making Ritter enough of a madman.
Billy is Billy. Not much really changed with him. He's still very imaginative, he's still quick to blurt out things. In fact there's not much new with the characters that the first book didn't already establish, but the trio are a fun group to follow, making this feel even less of a chore to reread. The twist is a bit mediocre, but also the only way to end the story properly. But, most importantly, it doesn't have the stench that often permeates with Goosebumps sequels. It's a book based on a decent first book that manages to care just enough about the original's event and build on a fun follow-up. What a four-leaf clover that is.
So, yeah. Easy recommend. It's not perfect and it feels like way too many of Stine's mad science books, but the premise is solid and the action is strong, even giving some scary and intense moments, which feels rare in Goosebumps. But we admittedly are at the final throws of the original 62 and this is where we start to see Stine go a bit wild. And this is just the start of an interesting final batch. We start deep, but get ready to go even deeper.
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