SUBMERGED: Underwater Horror Books and Other Strange Content
By EditorWriterJF on
Welcome to the depths. The mud is soft and dark. The blue-gray tones are cool and soothing. Don’t kick too hard. Just relax and pick your way through these fragments of underwater horror.
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Books
The clear winner for me this month was Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea. I went in expecting something more like Mira Grant’s Into the Deep, with a creature-feature feel. Instead, the book was an aching allegory for a relationship that’s reaching its conclusion. Painful, hopeful, and haunting, it’s got imagery that’s still living in my head.
The Deep was my second book by Alma Katsu, and From Below was my second book by Darcy Coates. In both cases, I did feel the endings frayed a bit: a little rushed, slightly scrambled. But in both cases, the fantastic vibes and atmosphere of the story made them totally worth the journey. Alma Katsu in particular is just super skilled at situating characters mentally in the time period she’s visiting.
Josh Malerman’s A House at the Bottom of a Lake better captures what I expected from Our Wives Under the Sea. The scary events are happening in real time, with more action and an emphasis on exploring what’s happening . . . but there’s a subtle subtext, a sense of relationship struggle or things left unsaid.
Whalefall by Daniel Kraus is a masterclass of squeezing every drop out of a metaphor: how reconciling with the shadow of a now-dead abusive father can feel like trying to escape getting eaten alive by a whale. It’s an incredible read, but I read it close on the heels of Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey. Because of that, I was struck by how, in contrast to Gailey’s main character, Jay seems to beg and yield. [SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT.] There’s a sense that Jay was somehow, at least in part, complicit in his father’s bad behavior, and in the end, there was far too great a sense of reconciliation for me. I much preferred Gailey’s Gothic depiction of a main character stepping into power, ending hungry and ready to bite.
“Um yes, hello!” If you don’t follow Geo Rutherford, you freaking should! On TikTok and Instagram (@geodesaurus), every October, she does a series called Spooky Lake Month. It’s science mixed with spookiness and great storytelling, and now, with her book, she’s mixing it with art! Her OWN art, because yes, she’s an artist too.
If you’re into anthologies, Broken Brains has one that’s smack on theme: SCREAMS FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR. It features 16 short stories based on the ocean depths from new voices in indie horror.
After tearing through Daniel Stone’s Sinkable, which gets deep into shipwrecks and their retrieval, I went down a shipwreck rabbit hole. In November of 2021, a Reddit user asked “What shipwreck gives you the creeps?” Here’s my favorite highlights:
The SS Kamloops lies on its side at the base of an underwater cliff. She vanished in 1927 during a snowstorm on Lake Superior, and her wreck wasn’t found again until 50 years later. During that time, though, we did find bodies and a desperate message in a bottle—some survivors had made it ashore, only to perish from exposure and starvation. A corpse, now nearly a century old, still resides aboard the submerged wreck, unable to fully decay in the cold waters.
”I am the last one left alive, freezing and starving to death on Isle Royale. I just want mom and dad to know my fate.”
– A handwritten note in a bottle penned by Alice Bettridge, a young assistant stewardess on the Kamloops
This rabbit-holing led me to another Reddit thread, this one on the MS Estonia. Did you know that shipwrecks can be loud? There’s nuance here: not all of them, and water is likely to muffle things for divers. But just imagine hearing one of these metal corpses groaning in the distance.
Diving Bells
I desperately need a horror novel about diving bells. Basically, a diving bell is an air-filled, air-tight chamber we lower into oceans and rivers. Picture a cup full of air upside-down underwater . . . and you’re standing inside the cup. A YouTube video of the Carl Straat went viral not long ago, showing a boat with a unique diving bell for rivers.
The real horror unfolds in how we developed this technology. One of the weirder deaths I read about was in 1783 around the coast of Ireland.
Charles Spalding, an Edinburgh confectioner who had tinkered with diving bell design, descended to a shipwreck with his nephew. About an hour passed. No signal came. The dive crew lifted the bell, only to find both men dead. What happened?
Les merveilles de la science, vol. 4 (1870), “Halley’s diving bell.”
Art
I think this untitled oil painting is by Jane Fisher, a 21st-century contemporary artist. Where it is posted online, the caption is roughly “girl climbs underwater stairs.” The effect is so ethereal, both dreamy and haunting.
André Musgrove does some extraordinary underwater photography. His whole website is stunning. If you’ve got a touch of submechanophobia that you half-enjoy triggering, go check his work out.
Games
In SILT, a haunting 2D horror game, you play as a deep-sea diver capable of possessing the marine life near you. Your glowing soul flows out of your helmet and into the creature, its eyes taking on that glow once it’s under your control. Of course, not everything is as susceptible as your basic angler fish or lazy shark. There’s also whatever lurks in the submerged temple to contend with.
