“So much horror that is successful to me usually turns on transformation or possession or mutilation.” In her novel, this bodily precarity is scored through with ecological instability, the boundaries between human and nonhuman made porous as Leah increasingly slips through Miri’s grasp. “There was the sense of her in the bath, but melting,” she says. “The horror that has always worked for me is bodily,” she explains, “because I think the body is the baffle between us and the world.” Inspired heavily by film rather than literature – Armfield fluently reels off The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Suspiria, and The Exorcist as familiar touchstones – Our Wives Under the Sea was initially a short story idea but really began as an image in Armfield’s head, of a woman’s body dissolving. It’s an oddly bodily reading experience but this is nothing less than apropos in Armfield’s fiction, the body is a crucible of anxiety and possibility, pregnant with the potential of violent transformation. Flitting between Leah’s travelogue of the doomed voyage and Miri’s grief-tinged present-day narrative, reading Armfield’s book feels like the first gasp of breaking surface in salted water, half-drowned and heavy-limbed. Marine biologist Leah returns to her wife Miri eerily altered, unable to find purchase either on dry land or in their once-swelling romance. With her debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, the story of a deep-sea research expedition gone horribly and mysteriously wrong is similarly steeped in this strange enmeshing of fear and yearning. Her first book Salt Slow was a collection of uncanny, bloody, haunting short stories where girls turn to wolves and shadowed ghosts of sleep leave an entire city insomniac. Disgusting and thrilling, horrific and tender: this is horror as Armfield sees it – and writes it.

Our wives under the sea a novel