What you have to understand, she says, is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.
This single sentence, found on the very first page, completely hooked me. This is a deeply unsettling novel, heavy with existential dread and a claustrophobia that makes it simultaneously difficult to read but difficult to stop. I found myself completely unable to put it down and devoured it in a single sitting.
Be warned the below contains some spoilers
Summary
Leah is a marine biologist whose three-week deep-sea research mission goes terribly wrong, leaving her and her crew stranded at the bottom of the ocean for six months. When she finally returns home, her wife, Miri, notices immediately that the woman who returned is not the same woman who left. Leah is distant, physically changing, and leaking salt water. As Miri struggles to understand what happened at the bottom of the ocean, she is also desperately trying to save the woman she loves.
Structure and Perspective
The novel has a dual-perspective, dual-timeline structure.
Miri’s POV (the present): Miri’s narrative is deeply emotional, nostalgic, and tender. She talks about the devastating reality of Leah’s change, contrasting the present with the vibrant, bubbly woman she married. There is a clear parallel between Miri’s current caregiving grief and her past trauma of losing her mother to a degenerative illness, as well as Miri’s own lurking hypochondria.
Leah’s POV (the past): Leah’s chapters talk about the claustrophobic nightmare of being trapped on the ocean floor. This thread is a masterclass in psychological horror and cosmic dread, tracking the slow breakdown of the submarine’s crew and the eerie, inexplicable phenomena they encounter in the deep.
Writing, Plot, and Themes
You can often tell when an author is trying too hard to be profound, but Armfield’s prose flows organically here. Aside from a few clunky sentences and slightly underdeveloped secondary characters, I found the writing beautiful and deeply poetic. (My heart is a thin thing, these days – shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs)
The plot moves slowly, but that’s intentional. This slow pace works perfectly here, as it gradually builds psychological pressure like water depth. Armfield reinforces this by naming the book’s sections after actual oceanic depth zones: the abyssal, the hadal, etc. As the book goes on, the vibe shifts from psychological dread straight into body horror. It leans heavily into themes of water, blood, and teeth to show Leah’s physical transformation, and that’s where I found some of my favourite quotes:
- In the days immediately following her return, blood would rise unheeded through her pores, so that sometimes I’d come in and find her pincushioned, dotted red as if pricked with needles;
- Leah is there and the bed is soaking and it takes me longer than it should do, even in the darkness, to realise the water is coming from her;
- One of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semi-solid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made of pure water
Final Thoughts
I did think maybe the book could’ve benefitted from another 50 pages or so, because some things felt slightly rushed in the sequence of Leah’s return. I wish we knew more about the mechanics of “the Centre”, like who was behind it, why they abandoned the crew, and what was the purpose of it all. Ultimately, though, the book aims to be a metaphor for terminal illness and grief, so I believe the choice to focus on the characters’ internal landscapes rather than the logistics of their trauma was probably intentional. Overall, this was a great read and I thought it did a great job of capturing what it means to grieve someone standing right in front of you.
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