DEEP FREEZE by Michael C. Grumley – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Deep Freeze by Michael C. Grumley
Series: Revival #1
Published by Forge Books on January 9 2024
Genres: Adult, Science fiction, Thriller
Pages: 336
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
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The nitty-gritty: A fascinating idea—cryonics—held my attention, but the plot was confusing at times, as the author kept his readers in the dark far too long.

Deep Freeze is a sci-fi thriller about cryonics, and I enjoyed parts of it very much. Saying that, I struggled with the way the story was told, which I’ll get into later in this review. I also wasn’t crazy about the way the author depicted women, and with some very cheesy dialog and a haphazard, confusing plot, this was definitely a mixed bag for me.

The story has a dramatic beginning: we meet an unnamed man traveling on a bus during a terrible winter storm. The bus loses traction on a bridge and plunges over the railing to the freezing river below. The man manages to help save many of the people on the bus, including a woman and her young son, but he isn’t fast enough to save his own life, as the bus finally sinks into the water before he can escape himself.

Next we meet a group of scientists in a high-tech laboratory, where an important event is unfolding. It seems after years of preparation, the experiment they’ve been working on is about come to fruition, although everyone is tense and worried about the outcome. We meet Rachel Souza and Henry Yamada, who are frantically working together to prepare the Machine, a large, coffin-sized contraption. Eventually the reader realizes that the scientists are trying to revive a frozen body, and it’s pretty clear that it has something to do with the man from the bus accident.

Later, the man, whose name is John Reiff, miraculously wakes up, and here’s where the story takes on a thriller vibe. The organization funding the lab turns out to have a more sinister agenda than simply making scientific and medical history, and so John finds himself caught up in something he doesn’t understand and ultimately ends up fighting for his life.

Let’s start with the positives. There’s a lot of science in this story, and it feels as if the author did quite a bit of research to make it seem authentic. I’m fascinated by cryonics and the idea of “freezing” people in order to bring them back to life in the future, and Grumley brings up lots of interesting facts and moral implications, so there was plenty to ponder as I was reading.

I also enjoyed the action scenes, which were very well done. The opening scene with the bus crashing into the river was tense and exciting, especially when the author is in John’s head as he experiences the freezing water and then realizes that he’s going to drown. There’s another great scene involving a secluded house and an assassin, so clearly the author knows how to write nail-biting scenes.

But now the negatives. Deep Freeze was one of those books that started out strong for me, but unfortunately took a downward turn about halfway through. Now, I do love a good sci-fi mystery, but when the author keeps all his secrets under wraps for most of the book, I tend to get a little annoyed and frustrated. That’s what happened here. Grumley alludes to a bunch of events that the reader knows nothing about and dances around them with cryptic statements that never seem to go anywhere. Even worse, the entire story is flipped upside down when new information is revealed around the halfway point, information that changed the entire story. 

Because he kept his readers in the dark for so long, I found the plot to be confusing at times. For example, Rachel has animal cages in her office, supposedly the animals that survived early cryonic experimentation. She’s developed a weird bond with them (weird because she’s a doctor and used them in experiments so why is she suddenly emotional about the survivors?) and is upset when she finds one of the mice dead in its cage. I didn’t feel like the implications of this were explained very well, and although these animals keep popping up in the story over and over, I couldn’t figure out why. There’s also a subplot about how John is drawing pictures of events he couldn’t possibly know about, and frustratingly enough, this is never explained either.

Most of the characters didn’t really impact me that much, I’m sorry to say. Many felt like stereotypes who did very predictable things. I was also disappointed in the way the female characters were written. Rachel is supposedly a brilliant vascular specialist, but when one of the characters tries to explain computer pixels to her, she suddenly turns dumb and confesses she doesn’t understand what he’s saying, lol. John is supposed to be the big mystery of the story—no one knows much about where he came from or his past history—and yet I felt zero sympathy for him, for some reason.

Probably the biggest issue I had, though, is the way the story was told. From the blurb, the reader thinks they’re getting a story told from John Reiff’s point of view. However, this isn’t the case at all. The narrative jumps around among all the characters, making for a very fractured story, and the instances where the reader is in John’s head are few and far between. When we find out that the story takes place in a post apocalyptic world, the reader is just as surprised as John is, even though we shouldn’t have been.

Deep Freeze ends on a shocking cliffhanger (which I’m still puzzling over, to be honest), so it looks like I’ll have to read the sequel to get some answers. And I’m very tempted, despite the issues I had. Many of the mysteries remain unsolved by the end of the book, which left me with a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction, so I guess the jury’s out on whether I’ll read the next book or not.

With thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.