Note: We read this book as an advanced review copy (ARC) given to our parent companies, everafterbooks.uk and theubergroup.org.
The coolest thing I noticed about the young adult horror novel The Deep Well is how the main character (April) struggles to find meaning in her suffering, while the rest of the world uses that suffering to fuel their curiosity and fantasies (moderate spoilers follow).
Five-year-old April Fischer lives with her parents at the site of an old mine, where an eccentric billionaire is drilling a hole to the center of the earth. April doesn't know or care why they're drilling this hole and spends her afternoons like many children do, eating ice cream and riding her bicycle. Until one day she hears a voice in her head that says, "time to fly." A voice so convincing that April starts riding towards the edge of the deep pit at the center of the mine, certain that she'll take off into the air.
April's father grabs her off the back of her bike at the last second, saving her life. Unfortunately for her, she's not the only one who's been hearing voices. April's memories of what happens next are fragmented and confusing, and the facts that emerge don't help much — an explosion, the mining crew massacred, and no signs of her father or the billionaire. They seem to have vanished into thin air.
Fast-forward a dozen years. Word gets out about the voices and the massacre, and April's identity is revealed. Message boards, videos, podcasts and everything else speculate about what really happened, and whether April's some kind of demon from hell. Disaster tourists stalk her, cultists try to kidnap her, and a low-budget movie version of her story makes everything worse. In short, it seems like the entire world has made up their mind about April and what happened, except April.
Even April's family does this. April's mother sees nothing but her own shame, for reasons she won't explain. Her aunt hides in a cabin near the site of the massacre, convinced that April's father is lost in an alternate dimension and can somehow be rescued. And April's younger sister — who wasn't even alive when all this happened — is sure the voices are a hoax, and April is an innocent victim.
But April? She remembers the voices and can still hear them whenever she's near the mine. And there's so much she can't recall — what exactly happened that day, how she managed to escape, and even her father's face. Therapists excuse these as the side effects of trauma, assigning even more significance to April's experiences that she never asked for.
All April wants is a normal existence where everyone around her doesn't seem to know her better than she knows herself. She can't escape her past, however, and eventually the facts come looking for her. Evidence of other tragedies at the mine, with disturbingly similar patterns. Forensics and scientific theories that suggest that April's aunt isn't so crazy, after all.
Faced with all this and the world's accumulated judgement, it would be hard for me to stay sane, and it certainly isn't easy for April. But April doesn't give up, and survives by exercising what Viktor Frankl referred to as "the last of the human freedoms" — she creates her own meaning, and goes her own way.
When all is said and done, I doubt that April will ever lead a normal life, but she does learn a lot more about the truth. And with that knowledge, April and her family find some peace in a world that will probably never leave them alone. Because in The Deep Well, we can't run away from the experiences that haunt us — we can only dig deeper.