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Miri's wife Leah was on a submarine that sank to the ocean floor and was lost for six months. When Leah returns unexpectedly, she has clearly come back wrong. The book alternates Miri's point of view in the present, living with the eerily altered Leah, and Leah's tale of the doomed submarine trip.
Isn't that a great premise and cover? I love things going horribly wrong on submarines, and I love "came back wrong," and Armfield's prose is very accomplished. It seems like this book (which got rave reviews from everyone but my commenters who had read it) had to be good. Unfortunately, you guys who commented were right. I didn't like it for the exact same reasons you guys didn't like it.
Things Miri does not do with her wife who is turning into something very strange: research folklore, take her to a doctor.
Things Miri does do: mope, take her to couple's counseling.
In the present timeline, Miri feels completely emotionally disconnected from Leah. Miri mopes around the house remembering her past life with the Leah she loved, and being mildly creeped out by and estranged from present Leah. Present Leah has all sorts of bizarre symptoms, doesn't eat, drinks salt water, and spends almost all her time in the bathtub. She doesn't do any normal human things or relate to her wife at all. Her only dialogue is to occasionally recites facts about the sea.
Despite Leah obviously being either extremely sick, turning into something inhuman, or an undersea doppelganger who isn't Leah at all, Miri makes only half-hearted attempts to get her medical care or figure out what's going on. She tried to contact the mysterious Center that ran the doomed expedition, but only gets a bureaucratic runaround. She does get Leah into couple's counseling, but it fails because Leah shows up for one meeting, is weird, and then refuses to return because she's too busy sitting in the bathtub.
In the past timeline, narrated by Leah, we get the doomed submarine expedition. It sank mysteriously and then sat at the bottom of the ocean floor. The three-person crew can't see anything or contact anyone. This storyline is amazingly boring. Very little actually happens, you get no sense of what life on a submarine is like, and the events that do happen are brief and don't have emotional impact. Like Miri, Leah spends a lot of time mentally reminiscing about their marriage.
As you can probably tell from Leah getting couple's counseling but not medical care, and Miri's failure to, say, do any research on ocean folklore, this book is not horror or dark fantasy at heart, but rather an allegory on the loss of a partner. Leah's condition and Miri's reactions to it have elements of a marriage dissolving for emotional reasons, losing a partner to dementia or mental illness, and losing a partner to terminal illness.
I love horror and fantasy that's metaphoric, but for me it has to be actual horror or fantasy as well as a metaphor. Pet Sematary is about death and how we cope with mortality, but there are also literal resurrections that people react to in a plausible manner. His House is about the cruel way countries treat immigrants and how you can leave your country but you can't leave your past, but there are also actual ghosts that people have to deal with. Our Wives Under the Sea doesn't work in terms of its actual plot, but only as a metaphor for the loss of a partner.
Unfortunately, it also didn't work for me on that level. I didn't like either Miri or Leah. I didn't dislike them. I just didn't care about them. They didn't feel very differentiated from each other pre-submarine - we get a ton of relationship minutiae and how they relate to the ocean, but all that detail didn't cohere into strong characters. I didn't care about their relationship, and the entire story is about the dissolution of their relationship. Miri is so disconnected from present Leah, and past Leah is physically separated from Miri, so the only time we saw their relationship actually working was inside their heads and in the past. I've seen writers make this sort of thing work, but it didn't work here.
This is a short book but it felt slow. Miri keeps going on and on and on about random stuff that has no point, like the neighbors who leave their TV on. There were a lot of individual good lines and paragraphs and ideas, plus some good body horror, especially a scene involving eyes. (If not for the brief but horrific eye scene, I classify this as definitely dark fantasy rather than horror.) There's a great subplot about the internet forum Miri finds where women roleplay being wives left behind by their astronaut husbands. But as a whole, I didn't like the book. And while I often like ambiguous or not completely explained endings in horror, WOW was the ending unsatisfying and annoying.
( Spoilery complaints )
Content notes: Body horror, mostly not that graphic but there's one very freaky eye horror scene. The entire book is about grief.
I love the watery woman cover and am annoyed that it was switched for this boring one. I guess the point is that the sea might as well be a desert if you're grieving? That's not a metaphor that appears in the book.
Isn't that a great premise and cover? I love things going horribly wrong on submarines, and I love "came back wrong," and Armfield's prose is very accomplished. It seems like this book (which got rave reviews from everyone but my commenters who had read it) had to be good. Unfortunately, you guys who commented were right. I didn't like it for the exact same reasons you guys didn't like it.
Things Miri does not do with her wife who is turning into something very strange: research folklore, take her to a doctor.
Things Miri does do: mope, take her to couple's counseling.
In the present timeline, Miri feels completely emotionally disconnected from Leah. Miri mopes around the house remembering her past life with the Leah she loved, and being mildly creeped out by and estranged from present Leah. Present Leah has all sorts of bizarre symptoms, doesn't eat, drinks salt water, and spends almost all her time in the bathtub. She doesn't do any normal human things or relate to her wife at all. Her only dialogue is to occasionally recites facts about the sea.
Despite Leah obviously being either extremely sick, turning into something inhuman, or an undersea doppelganger who isn't Leah at all, Miri makes only half-hearted attempts to get her medical care or figure out what's going on. She tried to contact the mysterious Center that ran the doomed expedition, but only gets a bureaucratic runaround. She does get Leah into couple's counseling, but it fails because Leah shows up for one meeting, is weird, and then refuses to return because she's too busy sitting in the bathtub.
In the past timeline, narrated by Leah, we get the doomed submarine expedition. It sank mysteriously and then sat at the bottom of the ocean floor. The three-person crew can't see anything or contact anyone. This storyline is amazingly boring. Very little actually happens, you get no sense of what life on a submarine is like, and the events that do happen are brief and don't have emotional impact. Like Miri, Leah spends a lot of time mentally reminiscing about their marriage.
As you can probably tell from Leah getting couple's counseling but not medical care, and Miri's failure to, say, do any research on ocean folklore, this book is not horror or dark fantasy at heart, but rather an allegory on the loss of a partner. Leah's condition and Miri's reactions to it have elements of a marriage dissolving for emotional reasons, losing a partner to dementia or mental illness, and losing a partner to terminal illness.
I love horror and fantasy that's metaphoric, but for me it has to be actual horror or fantasy as well as a metaphor. Pet Sematary is about death and how we cope with mortality, but there are also literal resurrections that people react to in a plausible manner. His House is about the cruel way countries treat immigrants and how you can leave your country but you can't leave your past, but there are also actual ghosts that people have to deal with. Our Wives Under the Sea doesn't work in terms of its actual plot, but only as a metaphor for the loss of a partner.
Unfortunately, it also didn't work for me on that level. I didn't like either Miri or Leah. I didn't dislike them. I just didn't care about them. They didn't feel very differentiated from each other pre-submarine - we get a ton of relationship minutiae and how they relate to the ocean, but all that detail didn't cohere into strong characters. I didn't care about their relationship, and the entire story is about the dissolution of their relationship. Miri is so disconnected from present Leah, and past Leah is physically separated from Miri, so the only time we saw their relationship actually working was inside their heads and in the past. I've seen writers make this sort of thing work, but it didn't work here.
This is a short book but it felt slow. Miri keeps going on and on and on about random stuff that has no point, like the neighbors who leave their TV on. There were a lot of individual good lines and paragraphs and ideas, plus some good body horror, especially a scene involving eyes. (If not for the brief but horrific eye scene, I classify this as definitely dark fantasy rather than horror.) There's a great subplot about the internet forum Miri finds where women roleplay being wives left behind by their astronaut husbands. But as a whole, I didn't like the book. And while I often like ambiguous or not completely explained endings in horror, WOW was the ending unsatisfying and annoying.
( Spoilery complaints )
Content notes: Body horror, mostly not that graphic but there's one very freaky eye horror scene. The entire book is about grief.
I love the watery woman cover and am annoyed that it was switched for this boring one. I guess the point is that the sea might as well be a desert if you're grieving? That's not a metaphor that appears in the book.
