Onyx reviews: Plunge by Joe Hill and Stuart Immonen

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 09/27/2020

Plunge brings together the six issues of the graphic novel serial from Joe Hill via his DC/Hill House imprint, featuring art by Stuart Immonen. This story of cosmic horror announces its intentions early by naming a missing research vessel the Derleth; August Derleth was an author and friend of H. P. Lovecraft, whose work he published.

David Lacome, VP of special projects at Rococo International, engages Captain Gage Carpenter and his crew to assist in the recovery of the Derleth, which went missing in 1983 with all thirty-two hands assumed lost. It suddenly started transmitting a distress signal the day after a tsunami struck the Alaskan coast, perhaps because the storm shifted the ship enough to partially energize its solar panels.

Derleth is located at an atoll in disputed territory. The US rejects Russia's claim to ownership of the island, but Lacome and Carpenter both know the Russians will aggressively defend itself against anyone attempting to reach the atoll, so this must be a covert operation.

Carpenter's crew includes his two younger brothers, who form a kind of Greek chorus/comedy relief duo. Their father was in the Coast Guard and died by drowning. Gage Carpenter, too, was briefly in the USCG before deeming the profession too dangerous. Now they run a wreck removal operation, which should be less perilous—except in rare cases like this.

Joining them on the expedition is Moriah Lamb, a British marine biologist who wrote a dissertation on deep water Arctic coral and who is an expert diver. When they arrive, they find the Derleth half-submerged, with indications it might have been deliberately scuttled by the crew. On the atoll, they are astonished to find a recently deceased survivor from the crew.

Moriah discovers weirdly deformed shellfish on the atoll, and the remote-controlled submersible sent to evaluate the Derleth is consumed by a massive sea creature. A search expedition stumbles upon mysterious mathematical writings outside and inside a cave. They then learn the island has more survivors, men who don't appear to have aged a day in the forty-plus years since they went missing and who are all blind due to an indigenous parasite.

The survivors offer gifts to their rescuers—solutions to long-standing mathematical puzzles, for example—in exchange for help accessing a mysterious hatch at the bottom of the atoll's crater, which was supposedly formed by an ancient meteor impact. As tensions rise between the badly outgunned rescuers and the Derleth's impossible crew, a showdown with cosmic implications begins.

Plunge calls to mind the movie The Thing, where an isolated team must deal with an alien infection that threatens to take over its members one at a time. In this coronavirus era, the threat of infection is particularly compelling. The story blends elements of cosmic and classic horror: the survivors resemble zombies and their endgame involves a creature straight out of Lovecraft's mythos. This isn't a book for kids: there's plenty of extreme violence, coarse language and sexual innuendo, including a cargo of sex toys that becomes a running joke.

At a mere six issues, this is a breezy story that crams a lot into it. The graphic layout is mostly traditional, with few variations from standard grid-style storytelling. The palette is primarily dark and grey, but vivid color is used for the jumpsuits worn by the survivors, making them stand out in any given panel, like a blinking red/orange light. Numbers and mathematical symbols "infect" the book's title from chapter to chapter as the situation worsens. It's a turbulent ride, and not everyone will make it to the end.