Jeff’s Reviews > The Maw > Status Update

Why mention that you have to go somewhere else before returning to an injured caver when you have to walk by her to get there?

How could your senses be heightened to the point that you can detect body heat and heartbeat from several feet away but you don't notice when a dead person jumps up and starts running through a cave?

Flashes of brilliance still appearing amongst the mess:

“What’s that sound?” asked Charlie. Straining his ears to listen, Milo soon heard it too—a distant dripping into hollow calcite flutes, the tinkling notes like music.

Characters change without sufficient cause and there's still not enough time spent on environmental description. Too vague, too consistently dire, and the editing is increasingly sloppy with missing words and typos.

Really great chapter endings with major revelations, but surprisingly little suspense. I'm not fully convinced of anyone's vulnerability or capability, their competence seems to adjust to the scene they're in. Also, Zajonc's subterranean world imagery is so close to being realized, but it gets fuzzy around the edges. That being said, this is very cool cave lore, almost rivals Long's Descent duology.

I am repeatedly convinced that Zajonc might have made a masterpiece of this story if it'd been allowed another hundred pages. Milo being the one to lead the team up to the hydraulic door when he wasn't aware of the plan in the first place and initially argued against it makes no sense, especially when he's the least experienced and physically fit. But then, his psychological reaction to the climb, nearly perfect.

I guess there wouldn't be much tension without the storm hitting this way, but it's unconvincing that this kind of group would be this naive about flooding when descending an unmapped cave system. Milo gets a little melodramatic when it would serve the narrative better to surprise the reader or at least behave authentically. Suspension of disbelief in jeopardy despite the solid prose.

A very strange way to resolve the big mental lapse that Milo suddenly suffers on his descent--building tension by putting the reader into the action and then, at the cliffhanger (okay, that pun was intended), cutting away from the scene to the aftermath, where no one is immediately confronting the issue at hand.

Milo's descent (no pun intended) into panic is a little abrupt, and after the whole pep talk about not effing up, he effs up as badly possible, directly contradicting each of his guide's instructions and also wielding a pocket knife while climbing?