The Descent

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Adventure isn't dead. It's just gone to Hell.

The Descent is a 1999 science-fiction/horror novel by American author Jeff Long focusing on the discovery and exploration of an extensive labyrinth of tunnels and passages stretching throughout the sub-surface of the entire world, inhabited by several species of alternately-evolved troglobitic hominids. While presently degenerate and brutal, the "hadals" had once possessed a high level of civilization, having reached the Iron Age as far back as 20,000 years ago and mentored subsequent human civilizations. Their fall from grace formed the basis of the historical belief in demons.

The book is split between two storylines. The first concerns an ill-fated expedition into the sub-planet. The other about the Beowulf Club, a group of highly-determined scholars who set out to find the historical figure who inspired the legends of The Devil. Eventually, these two stories intersect as the expedition comes face-to-face with Satan himself.

Has nothing to do with the video game series Descent. Nor the 2005 British horror film The Descent written and directed by Neil Marshall, although there are certainly similarities. The novel was followed by a sequel, Deeper, and The Ascent.

The Descent contains examples of

• Abhorrent Admirer: Clemens to Rebecca.
• All Of Them: Used twice in a row in Deeper.
• All Myths Are True: They're pet projects of Satan either Gone Horribly Right or Gone Horribly Wrong. Generally, the second. Some of them are still lurking around the world, starving or being worshiped and fed by madmen.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Reconstructed. Lip service is paid to the idea that the hadals simply act out of a culture with a different set of expectations about good and evil. None of that changes the fact that hadal behavior towards outsiders involves hefty doses of what humans would consider slavery, rape, mutilation, torture and cannibalism.
• Antichrist: Satan under Samantha's skin.
• Apathetic Citizens: At least one group of humans from below is like this, believing their hear their dead.
• Arc Words: The deeps provide. See Unusual Euphemism below.
• The Atoner: Beckwith. Ike in some manner.
• Beauty And The Beast: Clemens tried to invoke this with Rebecca.
• Beneath The Earth: The discovery and exploration of the sub-planet drives the plot of the novel.
• The Berserker: Ike is turned into this.
• Better To Die Than Be Killed: Considering that hadal captivity often leads to cannibalism and trauma-induced psychosis among humans, many characters choose to commit suicide instead.
• Bittersweet Ending: Rebecca escaped, and is reunited with (a vision of?) her daughter, which is actually Satan who found the closest thing to getting out... for now. Ike got out too, but he's still an Unwitting Pawn of Satan. Beckwith has come back with a lot more ghosts than with how he went in, and Ali's Self Exiled herself in Satan's cage to keep him there... and is implied to crack after death herself, thus releasing him sooner or later.
• Blackmail Is Such an Ugly Word:

  Clemens: I believe we can put a quick end to what seems to be brewing.

  Rebecca: A mutiny? Is that what you mean?

  Clemens: There's an ugly word. It sounds so old-fashioned, don't you think?

• Bodyguard Crush: Hunter, Clemens, Beckwith, Rebecca's entire army in a greater sense.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Clemens.
• Church Militant: Deconstructed with Rebecca. She's on an one-person crusade to rescue the only other person left to her - her child. And if she has to pretend to be this, to be the "patron whore" of a Rag Tag Band of... well, Ax Crazy Awesome Too Dumb To Live Jerk Asses to get her daughter back, so be it.
• Cold War: China and the US.
• Consummate Liar: Clemens.
• The Corruption: Turns out to be Satan.
• Dead Guy On Display: Satan has his former "disciples" on display there, as much for himself as well to Scare Em Straight in case they'd think to go against him.
• Dead Little Daughter: Maggie to Ike and Ali.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Between above and below.
• Demonic Possession: Satan claims to do this. At the end, he seems to reincarnate a part of himself in Samantha to get the closest he's been to the outside world.
• Doing In The Wizard: The novel goes to great lengths to show that seemingly supernatural phenomena observed in the sub-planet are rooted in science. Weird Science but science nonetheless.
  • Subverted in Deeper, though.
• The Dragon: Ike is the closest thing directly under Satan. Ali takes his place at the end.
• Eagleland: A deconstruction of type 1.
• Eats Babies: One of the many reasons people tend to not believe Satan Is Good.
• Enemy Mine: Rebecca invokes this and thinks it'll go smoothly, but she tends to forget Humans Are Bastards.
• Enthralling Siren: Satan has this power for souls, and souls bring more souls and people the same way. Hell, he probably created the mythological creatures too.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: People tend to not take too well the (sort of) trapped souls of their relatives calling to them. It Doesn't Help that lost souls of this world become Attention Whores, as Ali commented, competing for the attention of the living.
• Gone Horribly Right: The attack on "The Studio".
• Guns In Churches: Guns for Rebecca's posse are seen as this when above ground, since they're received through unsavory means and would destroy their credibility if seen in the open with them, or worse, would trigger a We Are Struggling Together moment before they even have the chance to "go under".
• The Hedonist: Satan has indulged in having sex and/or eating humans since they're so close to him in appearance. One of the reasons he goes out hunting (his own creations, for sport) or Eats Babies.
• Home Of Monsters: The "hell" below. With a twist: it's ours too (thus we're the monsters too) and it's where Satan lives too. At the end of Deeper, Ike tries to tell people to stop going there. It's implied he'll fail/be derailed by said Satan.
• Human Resources: An artifacts exhibit shows hadal weapons made of human bones.
• Humans Are Bastards: A lot chunk of them, at least.
• I'm A Humanitarian: One of the defining characteristics of Homo hadalis.
  • Humans are just as willing to, once stuck down there, making them no different.
• I Did What I Had To Do: Rebecca pitches this as her excuse. Nobody's buying it.
• It Didn't Help:

  [...] Rebecca started over the bridge. For the first steps, she actually felt graceful. Then the bridge began swaying in big arcs. It did not help trained its lights on the rope bridge.

• I Have Many Names: Satan gives his name to people according to their questions they have about him, all apparently embedded in history by himself.
• The Jail Bait Wait: Hadals kidnap little girls as Slave Slaves, but have to wait a year after their first period.
• Karmic Death: Clemens.
• The Ketchup Test: Clemens tastes some blood and proudly declares it's human female vaginal blood. May be a subversion since he was The Mole and had his "script" written a long time ago, so he didn't need to know and probably, indeed, just outright lied.
• Knight In Sour Armour: Ike. Beckwith in a certain measure.
• Mama Bear: Rebecca.
• Manipulative Bastard: Contest between Clemens and Satan, bordering on Complete Monsters.
• Master Of Illusion.
• Names To Run Away From Really Fast: Hunter. Satan intentionally averts this, using Meaningful Names, but not necessarily with bad connotations.
• Nice Job Breaking It Hero: Beckwith's entire story. Also the novel's ending.
• Not So Omniscient After All: Everyone goes out of their way to point this out about Satan. He admits it himself.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Satan threatens Ali to send her daughter below him if she ever leaves. When asked why would that be a bad thing, he says he doesn't know. She realises this means nothing return from there.
• Our Demons Are Different: First off, there are not demons. They are cave-dwelling hominids with a culture that makes the Aztecs look like the Amish. Also, they are revealed to be able to transmit the consciousness of their dead into other sapient lifeforms via electrical currents.
  • But then an expy of Satan appears...
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: The President of the United States apparently, as in the two cases a statement from him has been presented, once he quotes that people walk "through the shadow of the valley of death" and the second time he assures people that a Chinese washed-ashore submarine on American soil will not explode... so keep calm.
• Powder Keg Crowd: Poor Li triggered it...
• Precursors: Satan and... whatever made the Universe and imprisoned him. Arguable on either of their morality.
• Satan Is Good: What he'd like you to think. Arguably, he may be, but more of a Psychopathic Manchild, as he himself admits it. He'll make creatures, he'll save creatures, but he can't give life, and if you try to ditch on him, he'll cut pieces of your body and make you eat them because he may be genuinely answering your requests to feed you.
• Sex Slaves: The kidnapped girls are kept for this purpose.
• Shaming The Mob: It almost worked...
• Shout Out: Where to begin.
  • The expedition into the sub-planet is called The Jules Vernes Society.
  • The group of scholars looking for The Devil are called the Beowulf Club.
  • An entrance into the sub-planet inspired Dante in his depiction of Hell.
  • We have people in a certain area "warped" by "corruption", having "mutations" that keep the poor soul alive and functional.
  • There are people greatly deformed but with technological advances below, and people used as slaves above. You know, like Morlocks and Eloi.
• Social Darwinist: Satan turns into this, for relatively good reason. Species evolved more and more in His image, and from evolution, souls appeared, so generally he has less appreciation for anything under "the next best thing".
• Spanner In The Works: Beckwith, to the point that any action of his is important to the plot and, as much as he furthers a certain cause, he squashes more, thus he becomes the Butt Monkey of everyone, who ask him "what did you break this time?".
  • Clemens tries to do this, but he ends up doing almost exactly as he was asked, anyway.
• Think of The Children: Deconstructed, slowly but surely. By the end of the novel, thinking of the children has cost around a thousand lives and furthered Satan's plan to escape his cage.
• Thirty Pileup Gambit:

  There were twelve hundred different agendas out there, one for each man, each waiting to be unfolded in the days ahead.

  • It Gets Worse when you involve other various humans, hadal and, you know, Satan.
• Torches and Pitchforks.
• Trickster Mentor: Though because of his morality void, he's confused with Evil Mentor
• Unreliable Narrator: Rinpoche's "disciple" in Deeper has doubts that Satan can actually remodel life, and some of his other stories can be seen as unreliable, including saying God is nothingness and implying he knows of no such entity, but getting pissed at the name of God nonetheless.
• Unusual Euphemism: The deeps provide, which is fancy talk for "We kill anything that comes our way, hadals or even other cities/tribes people. Sometimes even our own that Protest Too Much.
• Villains Never Lie: Played straight with Satan. Subverted with Clemens.
• What Is This Thing You Call Love? Or Pity? Narrator outright says he certainly doesn't know the former. He uses the first to play with Ali and Ike.
• Who You Gonna Call? Reconstructed with Rebecca. She goes to all the government institutions for help with rescuing her little girl and has no luck. But then she becomes the "patron saint" of a racist posse, and soon she has an at least 1200 army, ready to be equipped with live army weapons to go find her daughter. Although most of them are scum of the Earth there for their own interests.
• Wicked Cultured: Satan claims he was there when most of human masterpieces were created, including Beethoven, Bach etc. Hell, he even possessed most of them to create those.
• Yank The Dog's Chain: Ike thinks he escaped Hell, but this is all at the plan of Satan. He also left his wife there, and helped lead out the creature he tried to keep below himself.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Satan is implied to eventually do this to humanity as he did to the hadal if they don't free him, if only for the same reason he did it to the hadal: because their empire has fallen and they stand in his way.
• Xanatos Gambit: Of course, since being the oldest sentient being in the Universe... you know. I don't have his daughter's soul? Ask his wife. I don't have the girls down here to play with and to blackmail Ali? No worries, I'll use that crazy mother to get a part of me outside.
• Xanatos Roulette: Rebecca plays this. Even she's scared what she got herself into and how it'll end.
• Xanatos Sucker: Rebecca turns out to be this. While she knows from the start she's used as the motor of more unscrupulous entrepreneurs, towards the end it's revealed she's this for Clemens, who in turned hijacked the same operation from Satan himself. At the end though, she takes the cake, as it's strongly implied she takes out the Antichrist in the form of Samantha.