With a sapphic romance at its heart and evocative horror imagery along the way, SEA-MOUTH will appeal to readers who have been drawn to the atmospheric isolation and queer passion (with a touch of marine gothic) of Our Wives Under the Sea and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and the gritty disgust and body horror interwoven with everyday intimacies of The Lamb, Nightbitch and Woman, Eating.

SEA-MOUTH
by Melissa Oliver-Powell
Virago, Publication date TBD
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Vinia is a high-flying corporate solicitor for a London firm, where she spends her time defending the interests of GlauCo, a multinational oil and gas giant. Her life is upended when she washes up on a polluted beach following an accident on a luxury yacht, and is rescued by Laura, a PhD researcher monitoring the mysterious migratory patterns of silver eels.

While convalescing under Laura’s care, Vinia’s recovery is stalled by a horrifying physical transformation. What begins as an insatiable hunger for rotting meat and a strange coarseness on her skin soon escalates into a full-scale metamorphosis: she begins growing silvery scales, gills, and a dorsal fin. Additionally, feelings of anger and passion that Vinia has spent her life repressing also rise to the surface.

Through a blossoming relationship, Laura and Vinia learn to embrace the strange (and hungry) parts of Vinia that can no longer be ignored. But her newfound freedom is threatened by Matt Glauser, the heir to GlauCo, and she must choose between returning to the “civilization » that exploited her and the ancient, monstrous fury rising from her own blood.

Melissa Oliver-Powell is a senior lecturer in Film and Literature at the University of York and spends her time teaching students about feminist theory and queer studies and showing them weird films from the sixties. Melissa is widely published as an academic, with work on French, English, Senegalese and American film in several books and journals, including Feminist Studies and French Screen Studies. Her book, Pepsi and the Pill: Motherhood, Politics and Film in Britain and France, 1958-1969, was published with Berghahn Books in 2022. She is originally from Cambridgeshire, spent her twenties as a Londoner, and is now based in York, where she lives with her wife, Aimee.