“It isn’t that her being back is difficult,” Miri says, “it’s that I’m not convinced she’s really back at all.” And with that, almost imperceptibly, the story slithers from a love story to a Lovecraft story. “She is silvered over,” Miri says, “oystered at her elbow creases and around the neck.” Increasingly taciturn, remote and irritated, Leah spends so much time in the bathtub that their water bill skyrockets. It’s not just Leah’s chronic fatigue she’s bleeding from her gums, and her skin has taken on a peculiar sheen. We know that she was discharged and sent home with nothing except a white noise machine, a pair of decompression socks and a book of aphorisms, but Miri senses something more complicated happened and is still happening to her spouse. Each of Miri’s chapters fills in some fresh and alarming detail about Leah’s symptoms. There’s more than a drop of “ The Turn of the Screw” in these pages - a fungal terror that spreads by sustained vagueness. She’s cleverly designed this story so that we only gradually become aware of how little we know.
Julia Armfield’s debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, is an exploration of this kind of loss, but it’s told through the lens of romantic horror. The very first line of her exceedingly moody story warns us to expect the. Those who lose loved ones to a gradual and progressive mental disorder endure a distinctive grieving process. But that common tale of woe feels shocking in Julia Armfield’s debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea. But Armfield exercises an exquisite - even sadistic - sense of suspense. A woman struggles to make sense of her partner’s decline.
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