The Black

By: Paul E. Cooley

Narrated by: Joe Hempel

Under 30,000 feet of water, the experimental exploration rig Leaguer has discovered an oil field larger than Saudi Arabia, with oil so sweet and pure, nations would go to war for the rights to it.

But as the team starts drilling exploration well after exploration well in their race to claim the sweet crude, a deep rumbling beneath the ocean floor shakes them all to their core. Something has been living in the oil, and it's about to give birth to the greatest threat humanity has ever seen.

The first book in Paul E Cooley's Parsec Award-winning series, The Black is a suspenseful thriller that puts the horror and action of movies such as Leviathan and Carpenter's The Thing right into listeners' hands.

This second edition includes a completely revised text.

©2022 Shadowpublications.com; 2nd edition (P)2022 Fireside Audio

Good character development & plot.

Enjoyed it very much. Will read the sequels. There shouldn’t be a 15-word minumum.

Need more books on oil rigs

This was decent, characters were deep enough that you understood them, but not deep enough to care if they died to the black.

The monster idea other than it consisting of oil seems rather unoriginal, but I didn’t really mind that.

What keeps me from recommending this is just how things were described, whether it was the monstrosity or the rig itself. When describing the monster it was always with simple descriptors (unlike Lovecraft whose description was void of detail) like oh it has an eye now or it has three legs, sell the horror of this thing or double down on the amorphous nature of it.

Description of the rig is more that I don’t feel the book was long enough to really get the dread/life of the workers in this situation. I came here for the oil rig setting and this was one of the most recommended, glad to have read it, but didn’t fill my oil rig setting need.

The Black

I enjoyed this book, it’s unlike anything I’ve listened to before but was full of action and suspense. I think it was well worth reading or listening to

Interesting

This is an interesting story. A different story from your normal book. Really enjoyed, very exciting. Recommend listen.

Good story but not much world building to me

Not bad, maybe not something I'd read again, but not bad. Read it on recommendation to it having The Thing vibes, which it kinda does. 2 main gripes. First is the world building was not really constructed. No place was described to the point I could picture it, so it was sort of hard to visualize what was going on in some scene, especially with character names changing from first to last usage constantly which also made it hard to keep track. Or if it wasn't between first and last names, at least the sudden jump between characters we never met, I honestly couldn't tell you unless I got a physical copy and color coded names. Second gripe is that if I took a shot for everytime I heard "[character] opened their mouth but then closed it" as a response to someone not having an answer, I could have downed a whole bottle of alcohol. Final note is anything really happening wasn't until the last 25%, which I get is try to build tension but still.