Rahul Vishnoi reviews The Mine by Arnab Ray (published by Hachette India, 2024).
First things first. This book needs a disclaimer the length of a curtain hanging in your reading room. The Mine by Arnab Ray is a story that, page after page, tests you. It teases you with violence and inflammatory dialogues. How much can you take? It pushes you and your limits, breaking them brick by brick while you keep erecting more walls to hide your reading self behind them. If you can’t take horror, this is abso-dapso-lutely not for you. I have made my disclaimer. Read at your own peril.
The prologue has all it takes to make a mass entertainer: an eerie location deep under the earth, a promise of deviant sex between two people separated by a vast age difference, a thrilling-by-the-second build-up and these lines:
Mother had always warned him of the dark.
– Arnab Ray, The Mine
What she had forgotten was to tell him about the light.
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A Crystal, A Shrine, and Some Secrets
The Mine is a story where a motley bunch of crowd, overachievers all of them, come together to solve a mystery hidden thousands of feet under the earth. A corporate is mining a crystal that will solve the energy crisis of the world. They, however, can’t drill for it anymore as they have come upon an eerie (erotic? scary? dangerous?) shrine that’s supposedly making people crazy with fear and guilt. Read about it more in the book, as any further descriptions might be considered a spoiler.
Apart from being overachievers, these people- Karan, Samar, Anjali, Preeti, and Akshay have a common vein running through them- a sordid past. Something dark hangs in their past lives which is threatening to come to the front. Their greed brought them to the mine, where they’re offered an obscene amount of money to come and tackle the problem at hand, but the problem is now going out of their hands and fast.
The employees of the mine who have been exposed to the shrine have all been losing their minds. Are they schizophrenic? But if so, how is it possible for a mental disease to appear at once in multiple victims? The story moves frenetically, going back and forth in time as the five protagonists keep on going back to their past to dig the answers to the questions that have hit them like a wall in their present.
The past is not dead here. It walks.
– Arnab Ray, The Mine
Twists, Turns and Unseen Demons
Arnab Ray has total control of the plot. He soon introduces a twist that changes the course of the story and casts doubt on every protagonist. Nothing is what it seems. Nobody is what they tell themselves to be. Everyone has something to hide. This is an age-old prop, but Ray handles it tactfully.
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My chief grouse with the book is that it appears to bite and claw at every last ray of sunshine, dooming everything to deep darkness. Sometimes, not only the dialogue but also the exposition comes out to be quite angry. This was a problem with the runway hit of 2023, The Age of Vice, too, where the author found even the shine of the stars ‘malevolent’. Ray could have toned down the anger a bit. Even a cat isn’t spared:
The doll’s house lay on the ground, smashed to fine dust. It must have come close to the shelfs edge and then that accursed cat, fattened by the prime cuts of fish that Anita would spoil it with, must have knocked it over, like it had the heavy vase in the living room a few months ago.
– Arnab Ray, The Mine
This all-black-nothing-white-not-even-grey writing sometimes tires the mind.
Ray moves the plot at a breakneck speed to keep the readers guessing. There are hidden laser shots, a nerve gas attack, a decapitation, and more. The characters are continuously at one another’s throats. The ones who seem to be good come under the spotlight because the mine exists in a world of high stakes: nobody can be that good without an ulterior motive.
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One of my favourite threads was Samar’s constant struggle with the memories of his lost daughter, Reshami. His repeated digging of the past post his entry into the mine adds to the thrill of the plot. Ray plays with the hidden demons we all have in our minds and unleashes them one at a time.
A shrine is just a pile of stones. And a mine… just a hole in the ground. No, it’s not the place that bothers me. I’s the people. Always the people. Because (…) the greatest evil… lies deep inside?
In a rare burst of comedic relief, Ray lets a character point out at another for her alleged underconfidence as a psychiatrist.
Dr Singh really likes making her recommendations as a qualified psychiatrist. She is almost afraid that no one takes her seriously otherwise.
Favourite Quote from The Mine by Arnab Ray
Arnab Ray certainly knows his one-liners. My favourite was:
Memories. The more beautiful they are, the deeper they cut.
Conclusion
The Mine by Arnab Ray is a power-packed punch of a book. Read it for its unapologetic violence and gory mood.
Have you read this edge-of-the-seat thriller with dark secrets aplenty? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
