The Maracot Deep, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle is best remembered for his Sherlock Holmes stories, but he wrote many other types of books. The Maracot Deep is a very late work. Most of it appeared in The Strand Magazine from October 1927 through February 1928, but it was followed by a chapter sized sequel in The Strand in April. These installment were collected, with other works, in The Maracot Deep and Other Stories in 1929, the year before Doyle’s death. Later editions, like the one I read, contain only the single work. And it is an odd one. Professor Maracot and two companions descend into the ocean and discover survivors from the destruction of Atlantis many thousands of years earlier. Mostly, the story is underdeveloped, and often it is even silly. The science of the deep ocean is laughable now, and must have seemed ridiculous nearly a century ago when the story was first published. In the final sequel chapter Doyle adds an encounter (conveniently left out of the earlier recounting) with a very long-lived demon, which causes the materialist Maracot to succumb to spiritualism. The result is a strange hodge-podge of a book, not particularly worthwhile for reading.