Some call them ghost sharks, the oldest and strangest looking creatures in the sea.
Marine biologist Brad Whitley has studied chimaera fish all his life. He thought he knew everything about them. He was wrong. Warming ocean temperatures free legions of prehistoric chimaera fish from their methane ice suspended animation. Now, in a corner of the Bermuda Triangle, the ocean waters run red. The … red. The 400 million year old massive killing machines know no mercy, destroying everything in their path. It will take Whitley, his climatologist ex-wife and the entire US Navy to stop them in the bloodiest battle ever seen on the high seas.
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Shark infested waters swimming in blood and gore!
A small backstory:
Suzanne Merriweather is a climatologist and she studies climate changes within the ocean, but when her and her crew discover a fissure on the ocean floor that is releasing methane – they also realize that the fissure is releasing chimaera sharks. The size of them is what has her worried as they are bigger than normal and they are out for blood.
The only man that can help her figure out what is going on is her ex-husband (Whit) and as much as she doesn’t want to get him involved, she has to pull him back into her life as he is the only one that has studied the chimaera sharks and knows them better than anyone.
When her and her ex-husband team back up they do not realize that they will be in a fight for survival as the chimaera sharks have infested the ocean and they are hungry for blood. Nothing will stop them tearing apart whatever lies in their path!
Thoughts:
This was a great shark story and as always with books by this author, it was a blood and guts feeding fest!
The last half of the book I read within 24 hours as I just could not put it down! There is tons of action throughout most of the book, but the last half of the book was a bloodfest!
It is a good thing I had my gore suit on as I needed it for this book! Giving this book five “Shark Infested” stars!
As I was closing in on the end of They Rise, Vice reported on scientists reviving 24,000 year-old multicellular microbes they’d found frozen in Siberian permafrost. While Hunter Shea’s scientific reasoning for this story, his first with Severed Press from back in 2016, is just plausible-enough, there is some actual real-life precedence for the scares being generated here. Granted, million-plus year-old chimera fish escaping from the ice thanks to growing methane vents on the freezing ocean floor is a bit of a leap from microscopic organisms, it’s just enough to kick that willing suspension of disbelief into high gear.
Honestly, though, even that’s more than I really needed here. I cracked open They Rise for the singular purpose of seeing ghost sharks eat people, scientific rigor be damned, and I was not the least bit disappointed. Shea, in fact, rarely, if ever, disappoints (I’m edging my bets here because if he ever does disappoint, it’s not a story I’ve read yet). Fun is always the name of the game in a Shea book, and that goes double for a Shea sea shanty like this (see if YOU can say Shea sea shanty three times fast).
The set-up is quick and dirty — old-timer fishermen make an unexpected catch and get attacked by the ugliest damn thing they’ve ever seen — and the story simple and easy enough to sink into. The latter involves, as I said above, prehistoric killer fish killing people and sinking boats. The main protag is an alcoholic marine biologist ichthyologist struggling to save the day, if he can keep his head up and away from a bottle long enough. The science is horror movie thin, but that’s all part of the fun, and Shea knows this well, so you never feel like you’re drowning in regurgitated research and factoids the author can’t let go of. It’s all just dirty, bloody joy.
Shea gets us off and running, and faster than you can Piranha we’re neck deep in toxic fish poisons, capsizing boats, some light commentary on the dangers of global warming, and, most important of all in a killer fish book, sweet, unbridled, glorious mayhem. They Rise is a good catch, y’all!
After reading some other books by this author, I knew one thing about his newest release. It would be crammed with action, suspense, and horror. He didn’t waste any time dropping me into the water and using me as chum for his shark swarm.
Some kind of new shark, or maybe it’s a prehistoric one, has appeared in the waters of the Bermuda Triangle. As their numbers grow, along with their size, the victims rise at a staggering rate. Think you’re safe in a boat? Nope. They can just leap aboard and snatch you, or sink the boat and then snatch you.
It’s a race to find out where they come from and to stop them before they spread across the globe.
I’ve always been fascinated by monsters from the deep. After Jaws, I could never look at the ocean the same way again. I’ve been deep sea fishing and seen huge sharks. And I’ve been at the beach and had to get out of the water because of a sighting. It’s well known that when swimming in the warm Gulf waters where I live, there are sharks swimming with me all the time. Just because you don’t see them, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Needless to say, after reading horror stories about sharks, and watching plenty of movies, I now have a pool and swim on shore.
The sharks in this book are terrifying. They attack in numbers, range from big to huge, and don’t let a boat get in their way. Once you’re on the menu, they won’t stop.
And something else this author does, or should I say doesn’t do. He doesn’t spare his characters. At any given time, they could become chum. So don’t get too attached.
Nonstop action, suspense, and carnage keep you glued to the story right to the end. At around 160 pages, it’s not that long. I sure could’ve read more.