Our Wives Under the Sea

The horror genre is a powerful pathway for exploring romance, which often has its own ghosts in the form of unspoken thoughts and deeply buried feelings. Our Wives Under the Sea takes advantage of that pathway to conduct a study of romance gone awry. Leah’s absence and presumed death, coupled with Miri’s intense bouts of anxiety, are only part of their relationship. Leah’s physical transformation—the most obvious signifier of change—mirrors her psychological one: She changes from a strong and stable partner, the one on whom Miri relies, into a silent and distant shadow of herself. Her physical body becomes literally more translucent and more fluid. Her experience in the submarine, stuck in the darkness in an unknown and mysterious place, and her physical metamorphosis are both conventions of the horror genre, marked by suspense and supernatural or inexplicable events and creatures. The couple’s mutual taste in movies—from The Fly to Jaws—highlights their (and, by extension, the author’s) familiarity with the tropes and traditions of horror films. The Fly features a man’s mutation into an insect, while Jaws is about battling terror from the deep, both subjects that feature in the book. It is also significant that much of the LBGTQ+ community has embraced the horror genre; the conventions of horror often reject social norms and traditional expectations while embracing unorthodox characters and pairings.