I liked Julia Armfield‘s Salt Slow, a New Weird short stories book, a lot. So I looked forward to reading her new novel Our Wives Under the Sea: Body horror, deep sea sciency mystery and a lesbian love story – how could I resist? I wasn’t disappointed. Those who expect your average YA story might be. Or you could let it open up a world of different styles of writing to you. This novel is far closer to Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation than to Guillermo de Toro’s Shape of Water if you’re one for comparisons.

This book is rough and subtle at the same time, more sea glass than diamond, that is part of what made it such an enjoyable read to me. Julia Armfield shines in slowly describing the otherwordly (and the ocean still is pretty much an other world to us, isn’t it?) transformation of Leah, the deep sea diver who returns to her wife Miri after an accident that forced her to live under the sea for months. Or rather: She luring us around this transformation.

It’s a book in which how something happens matters just as much as the plot itself and the chapters take turns and their sweet time to tell current events from Miri’s perspective and look back on what happened under the sea from Leah’s. Julia Armfield is rather good in letting her characters slowly sink into a withdrawal from the everyday world and each other. Giving the strange isolating effects of what happens the time to grow. It all creates an eerieness that made me almost hope for no resolution at the end. Maybe rather for a dissolution.

And I’m a sucker for this kind of dissolution. I loved it when Deanna Troi de-evolved into an amphibian creature in Star Trek TNG and was like, whoa, let her stay in her bathtub, don’t save her, let her soak in that good life! In Kim Eun-hee’s Kingdom I wondered how nice it must feel to live (or ‘unlive’, you know what I mean) as a zombie, to lose oneself in the arms of such a bustling mindless collective. A longing that also echos in a character like James, the whisperer, in Telltale game’s The Walking Dead final season who is so disappointed by humans that he withdraws to living peacefully among zombies (I lately enjoyed Teejay’s playthrough of it). Okay, sorry, I digress. Back to Our Wives Under the Sea.

At times I thought how the transformation in this book resembles how it works and feels to slowly lose and learn to accept losing a loved one to a severe illness. Or, you could let your thoughts drift in the direction of alienation and go as far as to heavy-handedly compare the pressure Leah experience’s in the deep sea to the kind of mental pressure of a work and life that take their toll and how employer and society as a collective fail and leave you and your partner alone with the consequences of being no longer fit for work or even life, a lack of support like in a Kafka novel. But just when your thoughts drifted to this sociopolitical stuff the otherworldly element of the story kicks in and gives you peace.
Well, kind of…