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��To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden.��

When Florence Welch recommends a book, I have to read it. This is just how things work. And this is how I spent my vacation travel time with a slow-burn, haunting and heartbreaking work that examines loss within the framework of horror, something most would probably not recommend as relaxation reading but for me it was infectiously perfect. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is a quiet earthquake, slowly rearranging your emotions through ever-growing tension and terror while simultaneously being incredibly tender. On the surface this is a horror novel, rocking on the waves of perspectives between married couple Miri and Leah as they tell of Leah’s traumatic submarine accident that has left her slowly transforming from the person she once was in a series of ghastly and chilling scenes. Most of the novel, however, recounts their relationship in contrast with the nearly-absent Leah of the present and the now-caregiver Miri who is at her wits end. ��The thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterward,�� Leah is told, and Armfield dives beneath the waves of loss to explore the void of absence and, at its heart, this novel is a moving meditation on grief and what it means to love a person. Armfield manages to make Our Wives Under the Sea a novel in which you will find yourself both shivering and sobbing as it slowly pulls you under into its shadowy depths.

**For added review reading benefit, this is a perfect pairing**

��The deep sea is a haunted house, a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.��

While I found this novel to be incredibly provocative and enjoyable, I suspect it will appeal mostly to a niche audience. It is less a horror novel and more an emotional interrogation set in a horror setting, blended to taste with a preference for the flavors of grief. Luckily, this is the sort of genre-experimentation I truly crave and for me the lack of much actually happening only seemed to heighten the tension of what was going on underneath. Armfield executes it all in gorgeous prose that is as unnerving as it is often rather romantic.

��Every couple, I think, enjoys its own mythology,�� Miri reflects, ��recollections like note cards to guide you around an exhibition.�� The novel is set upon Leah’s return after half a year’s absence stuck in a sunken submarine and much of the time is spent looking back on the Leah of the past now that present self seems a disintegrating shell devoid of the Leah she once knew. We are treated to reminicents of their story together, the sort of memories that become bathed in the light of golden era nostalgia and tell the narrative of a couple. It’s this museum of memories that makes the absence much more pronounced after a break-up or death, for instance. However, Armfield asks us if ��we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person,�� sort of like how in an on-again-off-again relationship the memories tease us back into thinking it can work before the reality of a person beyond the cherry-picked memories reminds us why it didn’t in the first place. The book seems like scattered vignettes, but that is precisely the effect Armfield hopes to convey:

��It’s easier, I think, to consider the fact of us in its many disparate pieces, as opposed to one vast and intractable thing. Easier, I think, to claw through the scatter of us in the hopes of retrieving something, of pulling some singular thing from the debris and holding it up to the light.
So, in pieces, then: a long time ago, we met.��

It is a really beautiful endeavor, seen in this light, with the novel being a prolonged terror plunging towards loss backlit by a montague of endearing memories. In effect it also examines how difficult it is to truly convey the impression of a romantic interest to someone not seeing them through your eyes:

��I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It’s nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about a partner and not wish they’d get to the point a little faster…It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.��

It’s passages like this that really drove this book deep into my heart and made me care for these characters. As well as adorable passages of their early love and learning each other. ��When I returned to this story later, I would superimpose an eighteen-year-old me over the top of the girlfriend, scribbling her out and sketching my lines in more permanent ink,�� Miri confesses in a cute section about Leah’s teenage past working in an aquarium.

Amidst all the horrors and Leah’s slow-burn retelling of what occurred beneath the ocean—brief passages that descend into a fever pitch of confusion and trauma—Armfield delivers a really moving portrait of relationships in general, being sincere, humorous, and often critical. I gasped at the mention of how Miri was relieved that a married couple they become couple-friends with was able to be funny without relying on their jokes being insults of their partner, which is a very spot on observation. Armfield also depicts a loving queer relationship that addresses the realistic aspects of being a woman in a patriarchal world, though the focus is on their love and coming together and not facing homophobia, which is nice to be able to read about the couple thriving instead of battling against society. The horrors here are something else, something lurking in the deep.

The loss of Leah, even when she is still here, is juxtaposed with Miri’s loss of her mother to a degenerative disease, showing the two situations as similar but more for the effect of highlighting their individualities. There is a motif of degeneration in this novel, such as Miri’s friend having her eyesight declining, and we are reminded that for as much love as our bodies can contain, they cannot forever remain. Loss is inevitable, and therefore coping is necessary. ��My heart is a thin thing, these days,�� Miri tells us, ��shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.�� The grief is disintegrating her as well, like an infectious symptom.

A stand-out portion of the novel involves Miri, during her months of not knowing where Leah is, discovering an online group that playacts as a support group for people with husbands that have vanished into space on long voyages. Armfield even creates an in-group set of terms and abbreviations (MTM: mission to mars, for example) that show the lengths people will go to examine the feeling of loss and lack, even when the lack is invented. It reminds us that this is a universal feeling, but one we often keep out of the public eye or even hide from our friends as if it is shameful. The healing, it seems, comes when we share grief together.

One thing that really struck me is how well researched this book is. The ocean facts prop the book up nicely and there is such care to keep the language centered on the idea of diving beneath the waves. Even the characters depressive thoughts are referred to as ��sunken thoughts.�� The ocean is a scary place in Armfield’s hands, a place she reminds us we know less about than the surface of the moon. The novel is even separated into sections titled after depths of the ocean. In an , Armfield discusses why the ocean is such a perfect setting for this queer romance/horror, being ��as a symbol of something forbidden,�� that functions as ��a very natural setting for coming-out narratives.�� The ocean itself comes alive like a character here, full of dread and mystery.

��I think it also has something to do with the fact that the sea can be many things at once. It can be very calm on the surface, and something can be going on underneath. That speaks to the way that we as queer people have to be so many different things to so many different people: to our parents, at work, to society, to our partners, et cetera. It’s a really useful tool in queer storytelling, which is why people return to it.��

Armfield has taken great care for this to come across in the novel, and I certainly will never look at a body of water the same. It is both the metaphor and the monster here.

��Miri said this to me once: Every horror movie ends the way you know it will.�� Without spoiling anything, this novel heads on a trajectory and satisfyingly stays its course. The book feels like a combination of Annihilation and a more-successful version of the final episode to , being more interested in the horrors of it’s themes than needing to satisfy a purely plot-driven conclusion. I would argue it does both, but I prefer quiet novels like this. There is so much intrigue going on in small doses that really keep you flipping pages, from the bizarre effects on Leah’s body, the mysterious Center she works for, and by leaving everything fairly vague and mysterious throughout the novel, Armfield allows the horror to seep into our thoughts and make us question our own interpretations. Scary, sweet and sinister, Our Wives Under the Sea is a brilliant examination of loss and a story that will haunt me for a long time. Come for the creepy, stay for the crying.

5/5

��When I was younger, I think some glib or cavalier part of me always believed that there was no such thing as heartache - that it was simply a case of things getting in past the ribcage and finding there was no way out. I know now, of course, that this was a stupid thing to think, in so far as most things we believe will turn out to be ridiculous in the end.��