Samantha Hunt

“I fell and fell and fell until I was so deep in love that love resembles a well, steep sides with no way out.”

There are some books that no matter how eloquent you may be, you won’t find the appropriate words to do them justice.

This is one of those books.

‘’It was a dark and stormy night,
and the ship was on the sea…’’

Our unnamed nineteen-year-old woman is the narrator of her story. A mermaid child, daughter of a merman and a mortal woman, she is waiting for her father who show more disappeared eleven years ago. And she was waiting, she fell in love with a handsome fisherman who decided to fight a war. A war that broke him. Waiting for anything is one of the most torturing feelings a human can experience. How much more difficult it is to wait for the two men you love the most…

‘’And the ocean spits what it thinks, like a storm, ‘’Don’t you ever try that again…’’

Isolation and entrapment are crucial themes in this beautiful story. This is a town that won’t let you leave. A community of silence, an eerie cage formed by storms and fogs, and sadness, and death. A community that clearly demonstrates the limited choices that are spoon-fed to its women. A community drained in misery and loss. There is no escape. From them, from yourself.

‘’I don’t think I can outrun the ocean, but I’ll try for your sake.’’

So, love becomes the means for survival. In sensual writing, with orgasmic metaphor, Hunt captures the raw, bodily longing the young woman feels for Jude...for Jude, the centre of her entire existence. Obsession? Yes, we could call it that. But sometimes, the deepest kind of love is the best obsession and here we have a ferocious kind of love that makes the reader wonder if they have ever fallen in love so deeply. And Jude? Well, let us hope we all have someone who would kill someone with their bare hands to protect us.

‘’Because doctor, this making a mortal love me is tasking business and I’m running out of time. So I tried to drown myself. I want to go back to the ocean.’’

Hunt’s prose carries the same eerie, elemental weight found in Daisy Johnson — the kind of writing that doesn’t try to impress, but instead seeps into you, and stays.

Though it echoes the shape of familiar myths — Undine, the Little Mermaid, the selkie tales — The Seas refuses to become a cautionary fable. The unnamed narrator, a girl who believes herself to be a mermaid, is not punished for her longing. Her love for Jude, fierce and devotional, is never mocked by the narrative. Her grief over her absent father is not pathologised. Samantha Hunt offers something rare and deeply humane: a story that does not punish the girl for hoping. Even at the end, as she walks into the sea, it is not surrender but return. She carries both men inside her — the one who left and the one who never truly arrived — and she keeps loving them, not out of delusion, but out of a belief so profound it reshapes reality. The novel draws from myth, but it doesn’t moralise. There is no 'lesson' here. Only the truth that even in madness, hope persists. And in that hope, the girl becomes something more than myth. She becomes mythic.

At one point, the narrator says of Jude: ‘He holds me. He hollows me. He hells me.’ It’s a line that could have tumbled straight out of Cathy Earnshaw’s mouth — feral, aching, utterly undone by love that is not tender but total. In this moment, the sensual becomes brutal. It’s not about seduction — it’s about how desire scrapes the soul raw. This is the kind of woman Hunt gives us: one who doesn’t fall in love — she falls into the fire and lets it consume her.

Our narrator doesn’t know who she is.
A girl? A mermaid? A grieving child? A madwoman? She is the girl in the book who wants too much, hopes too hard, loves too deeply. And unlike the world around her, she does not apologise for it. In a society that conditions women to swallow their longing, to package their passion into something pleasing or manageable, this narrator does the opposite: she confesses. She yearns. She says the thing out loud. And in doing so, she becomes not just a mythic figure — but a radical one. In this novel, the true rebellion isn’t becoming a mermaid. It’s daring to feel fully, in a world that insists on numbness.

She’s waiting for her father.For the sea to give her a sign.For someone to see her.
For meaning to reveal itself.And she waits in a town that never changes, in a life that refuses to move forward, with a love that is always just out of reach.

One of the most startling motifs in the novel is the narrator’s repeated reference to howling. Not crying, not speaking — howling. It’s a raw, almost animalistic expression of grief, desire, and helplessness. In a world where so much is misunderstood or left unsaid, howling becomes the most honest language. Hunt taps into something ancient here: the mythic, cry that echoes through folklore and sorrow alike. The howl is not madness. It’s memory. It’s longing. It’s life trying not to drown

The novel asks, quietly but relentlessly: Are we directing our lives, or simply responding to unseen variables? Are we the scientist, or the specimen? And in a world where grief, desire, and identity defy logic, even the illusion of control begins to unravel. It’s not a scientific process. It’s something messier, sadder, and more human.

*Beautiful, haunting Introduction by Maggie Nelson*

“He gave me an inside of ice so I'd never love you… But it didn't work. You are so close. You are sleeping in the next room. You are the only warm thing to me. So warm, I am melting.” — Jude

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

I picked this book up on a whim on vacation and I think it will be one of my favorites of the year.

[The Seas] is the story of a young woman as she approaches adulthood. She lives in a small coastal town with the highest rate of alcoholics in the nation. Her father walked into the ocean and she and her mother wait for him. Her grandfather uses a printing press to create backward letters and works on his dictionary. And Jude, the 33 year old man she is in love with, is highly damaged from his show more war experience in Iraq. Oh, and did I mention that the narrator is a mermaid?

I know it all sounds crazy but it works so beautifully. It's smart and sad and fantastical and real. Quite a feat for a debut novel. show less

Let's get the obvious out of the way: Samantha Hunt's "Mr. Splitfoot" often reads like a direct descendant of Katheryn Dunn's "Geek Love." Both book feature ubiquitous, creepily beautiful bodily difference that is capitalized upon for profit, malevolent cult leaders, and an argument that a world defined by normative bodies is necessarily limiting and restrictive. Hunt's novel is grounded in its setting in a way that Dunn's wasn't, though. To be specific, it's set in the vast, sparsely show more populated wilds and rusted-out towns of upstate New York, and the characters follow the route of the Erie Canal, more or less. Spiritually speaking, it takes place in the in the "old, weird America" that Greil Marcus identified as the ultimate source for America's 20th century musical innovations. We meet a different sort of freak there: grifters, outcasts, and lonely people stuck in nowhere towns whose heyday was decades, if not generations ago that are looking for a reason to stay or leave. Hunt seems to know this territory intimately: the book's sense of weird desolation and generalized neglect never really lifts and her descriptions are shockingly immediate and sometimes excruciatingly vivid. Hunt's writing is remarkably self-assured and it has a clear poetic bent, but, at the same time, it can be excruciatingly visceral. "Mr. Splitfoot" is one of those books that can be felt, not just read.

Perhaps I shouldn't have read this one while under quarantine."Mr. Splitfoot" is an emotionally intense book, populated as it is by drifters and misfits who have little to rely upon but themselves and each other. Their feelings for each other -- love, yearning, sadness, betrayal -- are intense and Hunt communicates them expertly. But her characters are also appealing, and may find their way into her reader's sympathies. While most of the book's main characters are, to some extent or another, con artists, the author makes it clear that that they know how to play upon the emotional needs of others because their own emotional needs are so overwhelming. The moments when they connect are intense: two of the characters here share an emotional bond so tight that their barely seem to recognize that they inhabit separate bodies. In this book, even mutual understanding can be a rare and powerful experience: the subplot I liked best had to do with the records sent into space on the Voyager probes, which tried to fit all of life on earth onto one long-playing record. Whether they've made anyone out there understand us any better isn't really known, but that's precisely the sort of mission that every character in "Mr. Splitfoot" seems to be on, and the moments in which they do connect are beautiful are immensely affecting. I'll probably have to read this one again to figure out what I really think of it, but this I've got no doubt that "Mr. Splitfoot" is an accomplishment of some sort. show less

Man, this is a weird, weird, wonderful book. It's a ghost story, set in rural upstate New York, and there are orphans and con artists and fake spiritualists and religious cults and the records that Carl Sagan made to send up in the Voyager spacecraft. And Elton John lyrics. And the most bizarre drug abuse incident imaginable.

There were a few moments when I almost lost faith in what Hunt was doing—there's a lot of stuff that seems totally random at first, and this is NOT a book for readers show more who need instant gratification as they go. But in the end it all makes perfect sense, in a very weird, weird, wonderful way. I kind of want to skim through it again now and check out all the parts that seemed loose-end-like to see where they fit, because they all do.

I think this may not be for everyone, but I just loved it—I read the last quarter in a white hot sinful heat when I was supposed to be doing something else. Now I really have to read The Invention of Everything Else, which I've had on the shelf for ages. show less