“There I was, two hundred feet under the sea…”
William “Billy” Deep, Jr. of Baltimore has always dreamed of being a famous undersea explorer. He tells us: “Underwater, I always felt as if I were in a faraway world. Breathing through the snorkel, I could live down here with the fish and the dolphins, I thought” (8). This is despite the fact that Billy suffers from terrifying nightmares of deep-sea monsters: sharks, octopi, and eels. For the summer, he and his younger sister Sheena have been sent to stay with their uncle, an accomplished marine biologist named George Deep (or simply “Dr. D”) on his boat “The Cassandra” off the coast of Ilandra, an island in the Caribbean Sea. Dr. D is a true lover of the ocean. In fact, he hates being on dry land for too long. Dr. D also has an assistant named Alexander Dubrow, a huge hulking figure likened to a football player.
Billy and Sheena spend their carefree summer days snorkeling around the lagoon while their uncle conducts his scientific explorations of the unique marine life in the area alongside Alexander. Dr. D forbids the kids from swimming in the dangerous waters of Clamshell Reef where there is poisonous red fire coral. However, typically while out snorkeling each day, Billy starts to fear scary things in the ocean, like tentacles brushing against his legs. Needless to say, Dr. D doesn’t believe Billy’s warnings of sea monsters.
Then one day, the “Marina Zoo” shows up beside “The Cassandra” offering a secret deal to Dr. D. The zookeepers have heard local rumors of a small mermaid swimming around in the lagoon. As such, they offer Dr. D a million dollars if he can search the area and catch the mermaid using his sonar technology. Billy is shocked as he listens from behind a closed door, but then he accidentally falls into the room and he is allowed to participate in the search.
The next day, while out snorkeling early in the morning, Billy is attacked by a shark before he is suddenly rescued by a mysterious creature from the deep that turns out to be –you guessed it—a mermaid! The friendly, playful mermaid immediately seems drawn to Billy, though she communicates in a series of unintelligible hums and clicks, and she apparently has the supernatural ability to heal people. Before long, Dr. D snatches them both up in a net and locks the mermaid inside a large tank. But Billy is dismayed. The mermaid who just saved his life is now despondent, in emotional distress, as she sinks to the bottom of the tank with her head in her hands. Billy tries to feed her a cookie which she rejects, but she does eat a squid. Billy desperately wants to release the mermaid back into the ocean.
But later that night, a group of shadowy men board “The Cassandra” and violently kidnap the mermaid inside her tank. Billy and Sheena rush after the men, shouting for help from Dr. D’s big assistant Alexander… but when Alexander appears ondeck, instead of fighting the kidnappers, he merely chats with them and discusses an exchange of money. As it turns out, this kidnapping plot was all part of his betrayal plan –Alexander has been offered twenty million dollars in exchange for the mermaid.
This leads to a wild midnight adventure as Billy, Sheena, and Dr. D launch an escape in a dinghy and join together with a big group of other mermaids to rescue the kidnapped mermaid. In the end, the mermaid is rescued and returned to the sea while Dr. D refuses the million-dollar check from the Marina Zoo, denying that any mermaids actually exist. We are reassured that Dr. D is, in fact, a moral figure in the end. However, it wouldn’t be a Goosebumps without a unique twist ending, and in this case, Billy goes out snorkeling again, hoping he will see the mermaid, but instead he comes face-to-face with a gigantic slimy head with one enormous eye. Apparently, sea monsters do exist!
As a fan of nautical adventures, Deep Trouble has a certain level of charm for me, even if the giant hammerhead shark on Tim Jacobus’s cover artwork is wildly misleading. Deep Trouble is less of a scary monster story, and more of a thrill-ride, particularly at the climax, but there are still plenty of familiar Goosebumps eye-rolling jump scare tropes here, from abrupt nightmares to false monsters in the ocean, but Deep Trouble does have a positive (albeit simplistic) moral message here, particularly with respect to the ethics of caging and studying animals for scientific purposes.
Stine, R.L. Deep Trouble. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1994.