Our Wives Under the Sea author Julia Armfield: ‘Horror and romance spring from the same core’

The award-winning writer of ‘salt slow’ blends genre fiction to dazzling effect in her debut novel. Kate Wyver talks to her about ‘reckoning with the body’, the ocean depths and the myth of success

‘There is a myth that writing is a rarefied occupation’ (Sophie Davidson)

Julia Armfield has an unconventional attitude to romance. “Horror is the most romantic genre,” the author says when we speak over Zoom, a few days before Valentine’s Day. She tilts her head, as if it’s obvious. “In some ways, I think the two things are synonymous.”

The 31-year-old Londoner has just published her debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea. Her first book, 2019’s salt slow, is an eerie, sexy collection of short stories that injects the mythic and monstrous into mundanity, with unsettling flashes of winged women and stone lovers. One of its stories, “The Great Awake”, in which sleep steps out of peoples’ bodies and wanders around at night, won the 2018 White Review short story prize. In Our Wives Under the Sea, Armfield continues her unique conjuring of the uncanny, as we follow Miri and her wife Leah – who works in deep-sea research – into the sinking abyss.

Armfield is sitting at her kitchen table, the countertop messy behind her. She leans on her elbows and speaks quickly. “Horror centres around a lot of the same things that I think work in romance,” she says. “They both spring from the same core, touching on quite primal feelings and fears. Both centre around extremity, passion, and trauma.” When Leah returns from a mysteriously delayed submarine trip, somehow not herself, Armfield combines the looming fear of the unknown with the terror of losing the person you know best.