However, the other thing that anchors this story is the relationship between Miri and Leah. Her use of unsettling scientific facts about the deep sea allows what is possible and what is impossible to bleed beautifully into each other. We learn just enough about the Centre to root Leah’s mission in the real world, while also positioning it in the realms of the uncanny (in comparison, Jeff VanderMeer’s acclaimed Annihilation drifted too far into unreality for me). The kind of concrete explanations for mysterious phenomena that you might get in science fiction, for example, don’t always work well alongside the usual rhythms of literary prose meanwhile, literary fiction’s penchant for strange metaphor can be confusing in a story where bizarre things are actually happening. While I think these two kinds of writing can work so well together (my own novel-in-progress, The Forest That Eats Bone , also occupies this space), some of their demands pull against each other. Much as I love this kind of crossover between literary fiction and speculative fiction/horror, I don’t think we should underestimate just how difficult it is to pull off. However, I couldn’t have anticipated just how much I would love this book. Deep-sea exploration, lesbians, speculative fiction, horror… plus that haunting cover. When I first read about Our Wives Under The Sea, Julia Armfield’s first novel, it sounded like it ticked a lot of my boxes. With the lights and power off, and the comms broken, they had no way of knowing just how deep they’d fallen – and no way of getting back up. Leah’s account of the mission alternates with Miri’s longer sections, as she describes how their submarine began to sink, as planned – and then just kept sinking. Leah won’t or can’t explain the length of her absence, and when Miri repeatedly calls her employer, the Centre, she remains in an endless loop of recorded messages. Miri’s biologist wife Leah has returned home after a deep-sea mission that was supposed to last for three weeks, but took three months. (If you want to get a sense of just how deep, I can’t recommend this enough, but brace yourself – it’s scary). Lying between roughly nineteen and thirty-six thousand feet, much of this layer of the water is unexplored, which is not to say uninhabited. Beyond this point, there is a final layer… This layer is known as the Hadalpelagic, or Hadal Zone, a name which speaks for itself.
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