Our Wives Under the Sea (Julia Armfield) + Shark Heart: A Love Story (Emily Habeck)

I truly did not mean to read these back-to-back (Libby decides my fate), but here we are: two deeply romantic surrealist body-horror transformation stories exploring anticipatory grief, the boundaries of humanity, and the trauma of love and loss through delightfully weird underwater conceits. Pick your poisson: Shark Heart is buoyed by light-touch magical realism, while Our Wives Under the Sea leans lovecraftian.