The Abyss

by Jere Cunningham

When coal miners in a God-fearing Southern town dig too deeply, they pierce the limits of hell, unleashing Satan's fiends, and find themselves facing the Apocalypse

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Novels

258 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published November 1, 1983

Reviews

[Grady Hendrix · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically it's Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town album by way of Dante's Inferno, building up to a meta-moment in which someone actually plays Darkness on the Edge of Town in this novel about a burned out, no hope Tennessee mountain town that suffers from a plague of demons when the big coal mining company accidentally drills directly into Hell. Forget Deepwater Horizon - this is an environmental disaster like we've never seen.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really more of a 3.5. The Abyss takes place in the small, dying Tennessee town of Bethel circa 1980. Bethel thrived to a degree due to a large, deep coal mine, but due to an accident and the general economy, it shut down during the Depression. Our main protagonist, Sean, left Bethel years ago, first on an athletic scholarship to UT, but after he blew out his knee, he wandered, eventually serving in the merchant marine on low-end freighters. When he heard his only brother died, leaving a pregnant wife and two small kids, Sean returned to Bethel to help out.

The good news? A coal company has decided to reopen the mine and the townies are ecstatic to say the least. Good jobs and good wages for many in the troubled economic times of the early Reagan era! Sean pals around with his old high school buddy Fly and starts sleeping with an old flame, Crystal, who now runs the only health clinic in town. Sean, broke, wants to work there but Crystal is opposed, citing all the deadly threats miners face. Cunningham really did some research here, or knows his stuff (he is a Tennessee native), as the portrait of Bethel and its inhabitants feels authentic as all get all.

The first two parts (the novel has four) focuses on the characters and their relationships, along with the trials and travails involved in reopening the mine. Something is odd about the bossman at the mine, however, and the mine itself has a reputation of being haunted. Cunningham does a great job in building the tension and fleshing out the myriad relationships among the characters here, especially when strange things start happening at the mine the closer it gets to reopening. So why not a higher rating? I do not want to get into spoiler territory here, but lets just say what they find in the mine is something biblical and concerns the book of revelations. Cunningham had me hooked for 3/4 of the novel, but the ending was a stretch for sure. And the denouement? Meh.

[Jaime · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had wanted to read this book since I first heard about in the 1980s. My anticipation and expectations were greater than the reality. The book's title is The Abyss. I felt like I fell into one as I read this book. The premise of the re-opening of a closed mine near the town of Bethel that leads to strange happenings. The author throws in the kitchen sink as he develops his (too) many characters: blood-thirsty animals, serpents, killers, religious fanatics, cheating people, greedy company men, bizarre eccentrics, and a gate to Hell. The ending was a bit ambiguous because it was either a negative or positive ending. Some may like this type of ending but I do not when the book has not been stellar.

The novel is Stephen King/Peter Straub-like novel in that it is rich in characters who have some serious issues and a an unknown menace. It has strong emotional power set against a background of impending doom. The major problem is that the author takes too long to get to the action and offers several ill-fitting answers and alludes to other factors. The writing is good but the path gets cluttered. The reader must tread through a lot of background information and meandering plot lines. I cannot say I despised reading this novel but certainly cannot say it was a pleasurable or even scary read.

[Wayne · Rating 1 out of 5]

My copy of this book must have had the wrong cover. It should have been called "Abysmal." This was truly a bad book. Not much going for it at all. Most of it has the feel of a "Harliquin" type romance novel. Local boy comes home to take care of his dead brother's family and work the mine. He's also has an eye for the town nurse. Sad stories of a dying town being brought by the mine. Boring. I don't listen to Springstein, so I have no idea what the others are going on about. All I know is that this book should be tossed down that exceedingly large hole with the author attached. Well. maybe just the book. What a waste of time.

[Stay Fetters · Rating 2 out of 5]

”I feel them down there, waiting, ready to get out, hear them scratching deep in the stone, whispering and waiting for us to go that deep…”

Bruce Springsteen meets AC/DC with a pinch of Hell thrown in.

The best thing about this book was the cover. Not much happened and it was slooooooow going. What did happen was a lot of beer drinking, lots of sex, and the town getting weirder and weirder as the days moved on. Nothing impressive but it will help you sleep at night.

[✮💋adison💋✮ · Rating 1 out of 5]

reading this book was probably the closest experience i’ve ever had to having my teeth pulled.
there’s WAY too much detail, and yet somehow i was still confused at the end of every single chapter because i had no idea what was going on. not every single thing needs to be compared to five other things to describe it.
within the first 20 pages were introduced to so many characters i lost track of which ones were actually important, not to mention the constant new introductions of characters that just didn’t matter within the last 10 pages.
tons of cliffhangers, i have no idea why there was even any mentions of a random church pop up in the middle of the field and not one person questioned it.
oh, but don’t worry, it has plenty of mentions of child abuse, underage prostitution, and so many sex scenes i was concerned if the author had just started writing five different books at once and just compiled them all together.
i would’ve been happier if everyone just died in the end, at least then i’d know what the fuck was happening.

[Shelly Wainwright · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one to me starts off slow and I will be honest I almost put it down and away but,once I start reading a book no matter if it is good or bad I will finish it. So I finished this without a regret. Once it started getting some "action" I kept reading til the end and then I was in awe. I felt like I was in the twilight zone or something,almost as if I was dreaming and woke up before the end. I found this book to be on of those that you just want an explanation at the end by the author, even though it did not need one but it was definitely a mind trip that was quite enjoyable and freakishly scary at the same time.

[A.R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant novel about miners digging to deep into the earth ... and unleashing Hell. This tale never bored me, contained the most brilliant description I've ever read, and had me breathless till the end. You must read this!

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, we start off with learning abt our myriad characters in an Appalachian coal town. Quite a depressing place, with everyone poor, and youngsters frequenting this new ‘strip’ instead of making traditional music & stories. The old mine shaft is reopened by a strange person [we don’t really get to bottom of this], then ahem well the horrors begin, with most residents not believing what is happening!

The ending is a bit WTF!? 😲 And there’s seemingly a purposeless story introduced.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review to come.

[Taco Banana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shitballs that was good

[Sarada · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the better offerings that I’ve read so far from the Paperbacks From Hell reprints, with its early chapters creating a nostalgic and compelling picture of a small 1980-ish Southern town. It has the same overall feeling as watching a low-budget movie from the era, so I read it through that lens a bit thinking about movies like "My Bloody Valentine." The writing, overall, isn’t bad (with an exception I’ll note below), and while it occasionally reaches too far for a metaphor or a turn of phrase, it at least mostly avoids too many cliches. It also lavishes a fair amount of attention on character details, and if you don’t like all of the characters they at least feel plausible. They even throw in a stereotypical 1980s computer nerd (a little earlier than they really showed up in pop culture, if I recall! I feel like that peaked around 1983). The overall plot of the novel is almost too simple to bother with, though, since you pretty much know everything you need to know from the cover and title. Yeah, mines go down into the earth, here’s a demon looking thing, I get it. But the way he built the story up was still very compelling for at least the first half of the book, and it felt like there would eventually be more to the plot. Hints of the history of the place and some deeper secret were strewn throughout, and yet in the end they don’t really pay off. The final section of the book, while full of really visually interesting gory imagery (lots of swirling, red-black, thorns, etc. pretty cool) ultimately feels like a cop-out and a huge disappointment. Like after 250 pages someone said “Okay, let’s wrap it up” and gave him about 15 minutes and a thesaurus bookmarked for words like "ooze." There’s one other thing I’d add though, which is almost comical. In at least the first half of the book I swear the word “breasts” appears on every page. I think I counted it three times on one page in particular! Every time the main female character is mentioned, we get to hear about what her breasts are doing about the situation. They are tingling or bouncy or perky or just kind of there, bumping up against things, in every scene. A textbook example of "how men write women" in the worst possible way—but pretty amusing. It was a good way to start off my fall horror reading, though, since I always like to read a couple of novels from the era before I get into my more serious ghostly reading.

[Kevin L · Rating 4 out of 5]

An angry and grim little read, don’t show up looking for a happy ending.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rare misstep from the Paperbacks from Hell series. This was just mostly very boring and directionless.

[Leonardo La Terza · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked how the author painted a God's Eye view of the city of Bethel and its inhabitants in the earlier passages, but when the story starts unfolding and they get closer to unleashing Hell, the prose turns to an impressionistic style that kind of lost me. I was more impressed with the surrealistic imagery, where logic stops making sense, than gripped by the narrative. It makes for a fine technical achievement (and that's nothing to sneer at), but not a very gratifying one in terms of propulsive and impending doom.

[Ramon Zarate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Besides the abrupt ending it delivers on some great scenes and imagery. The first half is like a lost Appalachia show or movie from the 70s that you can't stop watching.

[Jordan Anderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

M19, the deepest mine in the state of Tennessee is about to reopen. And while this means employment and a booming economy to the town of Bethel, it also brings with it a crawling sense of fear as most inhabitants know that there is something just not quite up to snuff with the coal mine, especially considering its sordid past.

This doesn’t deter most of the able bodied men from town, as one by one, they all sign up to work the coal tunnels and bring home money for their families. Amongst a deep cast of characters, there is Seth, an ex patriot from Bethel who plied the seas as a merchant marine under forged papers and comes back home after being discharged. We also have Fry, the stereotypical pervert, and Crystal, the obligatory sexual conquest of Seth who also kind of sorta moonlights as the town doctor (because of course, what small town doesn’t have the sexy physician to get all the men horny).

Long story short, these 3 main antagonists and the rest of Bethel are all thrown together when, lo and behold, everyone’s fears are eventually realized and the foremen of M19 dig too deep, opening up a cavern to Hell, thus unleashing torment upon everyone, from bloody tap water, to massive thorns, to, you guessed it, the appearance of the denizens of Hell itself.

While this premise sounds great, Cuningham manages to make Hell on Earth seem extremely boring. This book is 258 pages but read like 458. It’s slow as a frozen river for the first half, focusing more on soap opera drama between the small minded citizens of Bethel, than the actual hell that is befalling the town. Cunningham takes every opportunity to bog the pacing down with inane dialogue, pointless side characters, and overall boring exposition that does little to keep the reader entertained, except for random sex interludes (seriously, everyone in this story is so damned horny).

The second half does pick up a bit, but even then, it’s hard to keep focused as Cunningham makes things confusing and oddly paced. Things do happen but it’s difficult to tell why because stuff just occurs with hardly any explanation. One second things are fine, the next there is a solar eclipse. One moment Fry, Seth, and everyone else is fine, the next, half of them are rotting and possessed, despite most of them not even being in the mine to begin with. The town quickly falls into disrepair and chaos, though we aren’t really told why…I guess because the demons of hell are running amok? *shrugs*

I will say that Cunningham does do an awesome job of creating an aura of dread within these pages. As the town falls to Hell and the chances of escape become further and further away, the last 100 pages are an unsettling nightmare of despair, especially the ending that I actually didn’t see coming (and quite enjoyed to be honest). In fact, this felt quite similar to what Dean Koontz did in his last great novel The Taking.

I wavered between a 1 and 3 star rating as I had too many different emotions while reading The Abyss. Story wise, I’ve read a lot better, though I haven’t read many books with such great atmosphere. I guess I wouldn’t really recommend this one, but it is a great addition to anyone trying to collect the ever more illusive novels featured in Paperbacks from Hell. So, taking it all into consideration, I think 2 stars is more than fair.

[Monie Thach · Rating 2 out of 5]

If one combined the images of the biblical apocalypse and eternal damnation evoking the fire and brimstone evangelism reminiscent of George Whitefield and the decaying coal town reminiscent of Jere Cunningham's childhood, you would end up with The Abyss.

Brought back into print quite recently courtesy of Valancourt Books, the premise of the novel is the quick descent of a forgotten town into madness and hellfire as the old mine is opened up and drilled to greater depths, unleashing the sort of hellish plagues reminiscent of the Old Testament. This is an interesting enough premise, and one which readily plays to Jere Cunningham's strengths as seen in his previous work The Legacy. Namely, his deftness of describing unsettling and nightmarish phenomena through descriptive analogies, an essential part of any writer hoping to describe literal hell on Earth.

The last 30 pages, by the way, are phenomenally descriptive, capturing the grotesqueness of the damnation while avoiding the gratuity of splatter punk, Cunningham relying instead on metaphors and analogies to deliver a biblical description of the biblical apocalypse.

"Blackness split, orange flares boiled up across junk heaps; he was a brain trailing its own disembodied weblike nervous system, a jellyfish swimming in a lake of fire."

There is also surprisingly strong characterization for its characters, which do its part to elevate what this story is about, not simply of biblical end times, but of a decaying town now ruined by its own deal with the devil. Crystal Billingsley not only perfectly evokes the iconography of the ideal heroine, smart, compassionate, and motherly, but also of that deeply introspective person tied to the wellbeing of their town, their community. This degree of caring is not simply just some trait, but representative of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who, instead of leaving for New York or Nashville, remain beholden to their communities, not by a lack of opportunity, but by their empathy.

What can one woman do as she watches her town decay in economic depression, then degenerate and be destroyed into its own immoral morass?

On the other hand, Seth is the exact opposite, someone brought back to town out of an obligation that they are not entirely thankful for, reminiscent of those who seek the world only to find themselves at home without meaning or reason to be there, except for no meaning or reason to be anywhere else.

So, why am I walking away from this novel this is a worst overall story than The Legacy? The main issue is that the buildup to the apocalypse of the last 30 pages is varying levels of nonexistence, hampered by an unclear length of time over which events take place, and characters actions during that time span.

Let me back up. The book is structured so as to have the apocalypse itself be the climax/finale, rather than a pervasive setting in the books, a slow countdown to the horror as previously seen in The Legacy. Like The Legacy, we are focused on the relationships and history of the various inhabitants of Bethel, Tennessee, with our main characters being Seth Stacey and his love interest Crystal.

This sort of structure requires a countdown element, a clear progression, things going wrong, both heightening the stakes as well as providing increasing levels of characterization as Seth, Crystal, and the other characters react to the events occurring around them. This is where the story struggles.

It takes liberties on several fronts that makes this progression unclear. Firstly, Seth enters the mine on at least two separate occasions, before drifting around town skipping work, something not made obviously clear to the reader, being revealed by the other characters coming to this conclusion, rather than from Seth's own perspective. These two occasions, while unsettling, are merely just that, and the narrative does a poor job of communicating this shift in his character, as the events which would affect his decision to go to the mine are incredibly minor.

This is true for developments like the appearance of the thorns, and the growing decay of town itself. It occurs so quickly and with seemingly little surprise to the characters that the impact onto the reader is itself muted. Despite the numerous perspectives adopt across its 255 pages, we hardly see the town progressively become degraded into massive orgies and murders. Outside of some brief scenes, everything either happens overnight or over a week, feeling rushed and under characterized, and therefore as muted as everything else.

This is further exacerbated by the second issue common to both stories. A lack of direction, which for The Abyss is related to the action of its characters.

While The Legacy can bore readers by not making it clear what direction a story is headed with insufficient buildup, The Abyss commits the far more egregious error of not having their characters explain what they intend to do. Seth is the clearest example of this in the latter 100 or so pages, be it skipping work or going off to rescue his friend Fry. We see him heading off in his truck with scant supplies, but never where before we get there. This explains the key weakness of this novel.

In short? For a novel which seemingly relies on buildup, it surprisingly does awful job at using its multiple characters in building up, and strange events hardly seem treated with the seriousness, concern, and curiosity that would be warranted.

Its characters are interesting and empathetic, but are hardly utilized in exploring any potential themes that would arise out of setting your apocalyptic story in a rundown coal town now reexperiencing its past prosperity at a price. The apocalypse, the best part, is only within the last 30 or so pages.

2/5 stars it was an okay read, slightly inferior to The Legacy in all but its finale, and not seemingly on the level of Joan Samson's The Auctioneer, also a titled printed as a part of the Paperbacks from Hell collection.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Abyss is a really weird book. It all started out as an old mine operation that once was stopped for a mysterious reason. Unfortunately years later the mine was opened up again for production and during the time of drilling deep into the Earth's crust, miners have dug some sort of door open and let all kinds of chaotic hell to come loose. Blood red colored water, pets going insanely wild, and people being torn up into shreds without no clue of what creature had attacked the victim.

Honestly I thought this story really dragged. Too many people thinking about their own problems and how each story intertwines with the inhabitants of the mine. Not only that, each chapter paints too many unfinished painting that are irrelevant to the story. I honestly do not recommend this book to any kind of reader. I would have to say, this book belongs to the readers who will enjoy puzzling different things to see what they will come up with.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not much of a spoiler, given the reissued cover, to tell you that a mining company in a dying Tennessee coal town digs too deep and opens the door to Hell. But this is a truly Southern novel, rich with the sounds and food and connections and frustrations of a small town whose one hope was forcibly closed off decades ago. Cunningham knows what a party in a trailer smells like, how wives look at husbands who sell themselves to the mine, the foods people bring to a church social or drop by a grieving widow's house, the desperation of those who dreamed of escape and found themselves pulled back in.

And, wow, is it a 1981 novel--the year of Escape from New York and a lingering sense of American failure and epistemic confusion, stores shuttered and streets littered with the detritus of the golden age. (Surreal national-news blurts from the TV purvey a rich buffet of surreal rage and catastrophe.) It literalizes the message of anti-business classics like the temperance novel Ten Nights In a Barroom, wherein a saloon comes to town and wreaks hell. Here, it's not clear whether the company is literally run by servants of Satan, or Satan himself (the boss, we're told, seems to be everywhere, preaching the gospel of capitalism and hard work, his eyes glinting unsettlingly), or is just remorselessly maximizing it profits. Either way, though, this fits into the great American tradition of jeremiads about the ravages of capitalism--which makes it even more of a product of 1981.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

A down-and-out industrial time in Tennessee has seen better days, the only hope is the return of King Coal and the re-opening of the country’s deepest and most modern mine but in the company’s hubris, they dug too deep and burst into the very depths of Hell itself.

Abyss feels like a Bruce Springsteen album - there’s the industrial town that’s seen better days, the young guy and his girl desperate to get out while they can, the deep sense that this is both everything there is and that there’s something better out there. Jere Cunningham has captured really authentically the mood of an 80s mining town on the edge.

However Abyss takes a long time to get going, slowly increasing the weirdness and isolation that Bethel feels as the darkness from the depths envelops the town. There are a host of characters, nearly all of whom don’t figure in the final resolution, and it is hard to keep track of everyone at times. There are certainly some standout scenes of horror as demons and darkness tighten their grip on this slice of Americana but far too long is spent setting the scene. The denouement is too sudden and abruptly ends the novel without really any sense of resolution.

A tighter plot and more focus on a fewer number of characters would definitely benefit Abyss. It has a good plot and it is a strong metaphor for 80s corporate greed devouring and destroying all in its path. If it didn’t work as strongly as a novel, it’s still a good album concept for the Boss.

[DJMikeG · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the first novel I've read by Cunningham, and in all honesty, it is kind of a head scratcher. Cunningham's writing is good when it comes to vivid descriptions of the people and places of the small town the novel is set in. Though not too much overly horrific goes down in the first half of the book, I really dug this section the most, again, as Cunningham really has a talent for describing his Tennessee hamlet. Once the horror kicks in, I found it increasingly hard to read. Cunningham goes for this really surreal, psychedelic approach. While little nuggets of this kind of writing are very interesting, when page after page of it goes on, with little regard for pacing, it gets a little arduous. Also, Cunningham does the annoying Small Town Horror thing of introducing a ton of characters in the beginning rather quickly, then ignoring them for most of the book, then bringing them back in quick succession at the end. I was confused and didn't know who alot of these minor characters were by the end of it.
Part of my qualms with this book may be that "Small Town Horror" wasn't a true sub genre yet, so Cunningham's whacked out, psychedelic take on it might be not wholly satisfying to me because I have read so much in this sub genre, that it felt like there are beats missing here.

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I mean this, that call it what you will, the mine has reached some point of reality...Some depth in which there is reason to beware. Some point of irrationality in which only the basic rules begin to apply, the rules of good versus evil, the foundation of our very reality, that thing that supports our entire civilization."

I liked a lot in the book, but there were parts that fell apart. The writing was very well done, the characters were well drawn, and the setting was spot on. I think it swung too hard for the fences and by the end of the book there is a dizzying jumble of events that was surreal and confusing. That said, it's a kind of horror novel that you don't really see anymore. One of those epic ensembles without the epic page count. Out of all the many horror novels I've gone through since I was old enough for a library card, this one falls in the middle. I did appreciate the anger behind it against the cultural trends going on when it was written; the threat of capitalism run amok over workers' rights, the destruction of our environment and how a community is beaten into a mob that would turn against itself just to eke out brutal form of survival. That's probably the real horror the book depicts. Decent enough read for fans of vintage horror novels.

[Alex Wolfgang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not what I was expecting at all, which was a pulpy, fast-paced, fun, gory ride. Instead there was a ton of atmosphere and deep character work, as well as some genuinely chilling moments. The prose was extremely artful. That said, it was also pretty meandering at times and I think some of the characters could have been cut. The ending kinda had me rolling my eyes, but I had to ask myself, what else was I expecting in a book about hell coming to earth? Overall it was pretty solid and not nearly as bad as some of these other reviews suggest. Probably a 3.5 but I'm rating a 4 to offset the average rating.

[Djip Minderman · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's pretty good.
A tiiiny bit too schmaltzy in places, and it takes a while to get things going, but uses that time wisely to let you get to know the characters and the town they live in and to build up suspense.
When things get going however, they get going good. Speaking of which, I liked how some of the supernatural elements are kept vague and phantasmagorical. Generally things get wild, however.
Also had a fun and surprisingly surprising ending.
It's pretty good.

[Almustafa Couch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would think that this book would had a better opening on first impression but on reflection I can see it all as justified under the goals of the novel. I thought it was a well paced book that does not have any extraneous information in this fine book which is why I gave it such a high rating it was .one of my first dabblings into the horror genre and I won't be my last.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to explore a new type of book which does require a little thinking until it all falls into place.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Edward D Wood of horror

People seem to be smoking drugs and listening to Bruce Springsteen according to most of the reviews here

Basically this is the second best book to read for those people who go to church and sit on the plaid sofa with a boner and read Flowers in the Attic.

Almost as good as Tribulation with Howie Mandel and Margot Kidder trying to stop the Antichrist in the van.

[Hayden Gilbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued when stumbling across this title in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell. As soon as I read "A Springsteen song goes straight to hell" I snatched it up. But it took me a while to finish as it reads like an empty Salem's Lot. Overall it's a crazy story and if you're looking for a book like a song from The Boss that ends with the apocalypse, it eventually delivers.

[Greggy · Rating 1 out of 5]

what an unpleasant slog. there were a few intriguing details (i thought it was interesting how things started to rot and fall apart as the gate to hell was opened particularly) but no characters i gave a shit about and the ending was protracted and nasty until an abrupt hand of god stopped it all. given the subject matter i dont hold that ending against it, just everything else.

[Alec · Rating 1 out of 5]

Every once in a while a book comes along to totally sap your reading momentum. I was reading a book a week before I picked this guy up and commenced to read 2-3 pages a day for over a month. I found it boring, complicated, and very hard to visualize. The first total dud in the Paperbacks from Hell reissue series.