Oh boy, did I want to like this a lot more than I did! It's advertised as cosmic horror at sea, which is right up my alley, and adding cults to that mix is even better. The elevator pitch seems to be 'The Descent' meets 'The Ritual', which sounds pretty cool, and I can see why but it isn't that accurate. 'The Descent' is understandable because we follow half a dozen characters into a cave system, but that's a claustrophobic monster movie and this isn't really any of those things. 'The Ritual', I can't look up too much, if we're talking the Adam Nevill book, because it's on my TBR list for sometime in the next few months, but what I do know about it doesn't ring too similar.

Initially, it's excellent stuff, a thoroughly modern take on old Lovecraftian pulp conceits. There's a weird monolith that's risen mysteriously off the coast of Seal Harbor, Maine in the midst of a vast unnatural storm, that seems to vindicate all that Prof. Edward Beck has been talking about for an awfully long time. It's to do with Leviathan, partly the gigantic biblical sea serpent but morphed by an ancient sea cult into some sort of fallen angel. He assembles a crew of five explorers and the transport to the sea cave in the monolith, where they discover human bones, immense runes in a weird Enochian dialect and that the entire thing is nestled in a weird perpetual eye of calm. That setup still gives me tingles and I was relishing every moment of this for quite a while.

Well, not quite every moment. The very beginning of the book, just the first few pages, was highly confusing to me. I believe Beck is a professor somewhere in Ohio and Caroline Destler, who's both his grad student and lover, naturally works with him. However, she seems to spend the first page driving from Maine to Ohio to get to his lecture, only to then fly back to Maine to the monolith. It makes no sense. Maybe Beck's at the University of Maine. Or maybe they're all in Kentucky. What boggles my mind the most is that none of that matters in the slightest. What matters is that the whole party ends up at the monolith.

But back to the excellent stuff. As soon as they make it into the sea cave, the entrance collapses around them, trapping them inside. While it might not have been the best idea to venture into a weird sea cave covered in Enochian runes that manifested out of nowhere during an otherwordly storm, that's just horror movie logic trying to enforce itself. In academic terms, this is absolutely the find of a lifetime, maybe more for Beck than anyone else because it seems to be vindicating a bunch of his fringe theories already and promises to vindicate the rest, but for us too. I'd love to have been part of this group of explorers and we haven't even got to the cyclopean library yet.

Of course, this is a horror novel, so things don't go great. The Grunstadts, a couple of Swedes who brought equipment, die first, and then Iskra, the substitute photographer is literally ripped apart by amorphous shadow creatures. Beck and Caroline are isolated from the rest of the party and it feels like the monolith's topology isn't following the basic laws of physics. Bontrager doesn't use "non-Euclidean geometry" but we're thinking it anyway. In fact, she doesn't use many of the usual examples of pulp vocabulary that we might have expected, just "viscid" once and "squamous" twice. This is firmly a contemporary cosmic horror novel, however much it's aware of its genre origins.

So far so good, but I haven't introduced you to most of the characters for a reason. Here's where I started to have sinking feelings about the book, however glorious the location is and however the author continues to elevate it in weirdness. All these characters are insufferable but one and she isn't the lead. Now, part of this is the point of the book. Beck believes that the voices and visions and everything else weird that's going on inside the monolith is a test, a trial by ordeal; in fact, A Cloister of Trials, using capital letters very deliberately. Leviathan will test each of them in some weird, unique, highly personal way, and, if they fail, they die.

What that translates to is that they're all problematic people, except perhaps Iskra who was only there because the appointed photographer couldn't show up. But hey, she's dead already. So the rest have to have something awful in their pasts that can be used by an angelic monster for a test, whatever it's looking for in them: to face their worst nightmares again, to atone for their actions during those moments or to simply accept them and the ramifications of how that translates into who they have become. I have my ideas as to what Leviathan was really doing, but I'm not entirely convinced by them and maybe it doesn't even matter.

However, even if there are good reasons why these characters are awful, the characters still have to be awful. I remember how acutely polarising Cassandra Khaw's 'Nothing But Blackened Teeth' was, half its readers praising its setting and its prose but the other half decrying it because every single frickin' character was awful. That's not the case here, but it comes frustratingly close. Beck is a narcissistic prick who has no compassion for anyone under his care. Caroline may be intended to be a counter to him, splitting away as she learns what he's like, but she's a whiny bitch who has no compunction in sleeping with a married man and agonises over how awful he's being when she loves him. I never had a problem with the particular darkness she carries with her that naturally feeds her personal test, but I had a huge problem with her.

And it isn't only the two leads. Iskra doesn't really count in this discussion because she's killed off too quickly, but the others do. Hannah may be a good medic but she's an acerbic bitch who brings out the worst in Caroline. They grow each other's bitchiness just by co-existing in the same space and I hated both of them for it. Dorothy is less obviously awful but it's there throughout and she never shows the redeeming side that Hannah does. At least Hannah has useful medical training. As a novelist, Dorothy doesn't bring anything positive and that only leaves negative.

Oliver is a total asshole from moment one, ever confident that he's the best of them without any justification. He's a tough guy who crumbles at the slightest pressure, a failure who takes his own limitations out on everyone else. At one point, he actually tries to burn Beck's notes and partially succeeds. Sure, Beck's an asshole, too, but he's the only one who has the slightest clue what's going on. Why would you ever burn his notes? I don't believe I've ever felt a stronger need to reach into a novel and punch a character in the face. The only thing I wanted from him was to die first but he couldn't even get that right.

And that leaves Mallory, for whom I found a good deal of sympathy. Like some of the others in the group, there were strong reasons behind why she did the awful thing she did, and like some of the others in the group, I didn't have a problem with her because of that. I was always on her side. I'd read her book, but this isn't it.

The problem is that I got the strong feeling that we were supposed to like these characters until revelations explained why we shouldn't. They might look like good people but that's only a front and they're awful people underneath. Instead, I disliked everyone from the start and didn't have much of a problem with their darker sides. I didn't end up thinking, post-revelations, that anyone was a bigger asshole because of their pasts. Those pasts surely explained a lot of things, but they were just awful people anyway. Except, in every instance, Mallory.

So I kind of loved this and kind of hated it at the same time. Its setting is utterly glorious and kept getting better as it went. The characters are irredeemably awful (except one). The trials, which I must say took over the majority of the novel, were never bad and were often excellent, but they failed to shine with the power they should have had because of who the characters were. If I think you're awful anyway, I'm not going to suddenly think bad of you because of a revelation from your past. If I outright want you to die already, I'm not invested in you surviving your test. And so this started strong, really strong, but gradually faded. I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. ~~ Hal C F Astell