Frightful Reads Friday Dive into Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Source: FantasticFiction

Welcome back to another Frightful Reads Friday, your weekly descent into books that blur the line between horror and humanity. This week’s recommendation doesn’t scream — it whispers, and those whispers echo long after the last page.

If you’re looking for a horror novel that’s poetic, painful, and quietly horrifying, Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea may just pull you into the deep.

But be warned: not everything that returns from the ocean comes back whole.

What’s the Story?

At its surface, this is a love story.

Miri’s wife, Leah, was sent on a routine deep-sea mission aboard a submersible. It was supposed to last weeks. Instead, she was lost for months — with no explanation, no contact, and no answers.

And then… she came back.

But something isn’t right.

Leah is distant. Her body is changing. She spends hours in the bathtub. She drinks saltwater. The woman who came back looks like Leah, speaks like Leah — but doesn’t feel like Leah. And as the days pass, Miri begins to fear she hasn’t gotten her wife back at all.

Through alternating perspectives — Miri’s aching confusion and Leah’s fragmented recollections — we slowly unravel the mystery of what happened beneath the sea, and what it cost to come back.

Why It Belongs in Your Horror TBR

This isn’t horror with teeth and claws — it’s horror with pressure, like being miles under water. It builds slowly, relentlessly. Every chapter is a breath you didn’t realise you were holding.

Julia Armfield does something rare in horror: she lets you mourn while you fear. The terror here lies not just in the unknowable — the deep sea, the transformation, the cosmic implications — but in the emotional decay that follows trauma. Grief and love are stitched into every sentence like salt into skin.

You’ll find hints of:

• Cosmic horror, a la Lovecraft — but for once, with women and queer love at the centre

• The quiet, existential dread of Annihilation

• The tragic tenderness of The Shape of Water — but darker, and colder

• A love story that decays beautifully into something monstrous

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📖 Themes That Haunt Long After Reading

• Grief as body horror: Watching someone you love change in ways you can’t stop or explain

• Queerness and isolation: How trauma warps intimacy, especially in queer relationships

• The unknowable deep: The ocean as a metaphor for depression, transformation, and the alien

• Post-trauma disconnection: When returning home is not a happy ending, but the start of something worse

This book is horror not just because of what happens, but because of what it means. It’s horror as metaphor — and metaphor with teeth.

Best Read With:

• Rain or ocean sounds in the background

• A bath you’ll second-guess stepping into

• A dim reading light and a playlist full of reverb and melancholy

• An open heart, ready to be cracked apart slowly

  
  

Lines That Will Haunt You

“I know what it is to love someone and not be able to help them.”

“I’m not sure there’s a word for the space between us now.”

“Sometimes I think the ocean wants to keep what it takes.”

If you love literary horror that aches as much as it unsettles, these lines are a glimpse of the cold beauty waiting beneath the surface.

Final Verdict

Our Wives Under the Sea isn’t for readers craving fast-paced terror — it’s for those who want to drown in atmosphere, in feeling, in slow-building dread. It’s a horror story about love that rots, grief that lingers, and bodies that don't come back the same.

By the end, you may not be sure what exactly Leah became — but you’ll feel it in your bones.