Samantha Hunt's debut, The Seas, originally published in 2004, is far from the average twee mermaid affair. Written in the chimeric style that Hunt has become known for, the novel is a watery meditation on the "surrender places" of desire, trauma and grief.
The unnamed 19-year-old narrator, who may or may not be a mermaid, lives with her family in a house once divided into sailors' apartments in a claustrophobic northern coastal town known for its high rate of alcoholism. Her father, with whom she shares a yearning to return to the ocean, disappeared into the sea years ago. The object of her desire is an older Iraq War veteran named Jude who suffers from PTSD. ("He holds me. He hollows me. He hells me.") Both relationships are with drowned ghosts.
With a point of view beached on the thin space between the conscious and subconscious, the narrator's perception is faulty. Throughout the book, she is captivated by the color blue. Her fascination references both the murky and unstable depths of the seas, as well as the hazy, always unattainable and distant blue horizons. It exemplifies both her unclear state of mind and her pointed hungers. Blue then becomes a signal coloring the obscured, permeable border between what can and cannot be grasped, what may or may not be real in this strange, somber and beautiful story. --Shannon Hanks-Mackey, editor and bookseller