by Corrine Watson
April 29, 2025
The Sea Gives Up Its Dead by Molly Olguín; Red Hen Press; 152 pages; $16.95.
The genre-bending stories in Molly Olguín’s debut collection, The Sea Gives Up the Dead, immerse the reader in uniquely haunting tales shaped by grief and longing that cannot be tamed or contained. With quiet surrealism, these stories take on the tone of a dark folklore or modern fairy tale, where princesses aren’t saved from the dragon, and desire comes at a price. As the characters in the collection struggle to let go of the dead, lost love, or their idealized lives, Olguín asks readers to sit with the ghosts in order to understand what it means to be alive and deeply human in the face of a fleeting mortality.
Olguín forces her characters to hold space for the dead. Her characters hold mortality in their hands and face grief head on, and the discomfort is distinctly palpable throughout the collection. In Claira Agulara’s Holy Lungs, a girl’s body is found after a tragic flood, and in spite of her missing lungs and suffering exposure to the elements, her body does not exhibit any other signs of decay. Olguín writes, “It worried everyone who saw it, little splinters of unease working under the skin. She didn’t look dead, but they were assured she was. In some deep and animal way, this was troubling.” Olguín aptly illustrates the unease of the uncanny valley as our primal nature draws us to look away from the dead to alleviate our own fear and grief over mortality. As Claira ascends from tragically dead teenager to holy relic, Olguín captures the ways we strive to find meaning in our grief or elevate the unknown into something more tangible.
Yet for Claira’s sister, Olguín suggests that there is a secondary loss for Claira’s sister because even though she was reunited with her sister’s preserved remains, there is a sense that they no longer belong to her – they belong to the world as a media spectacle. As she sits with her sister’s body, “It occurred to her that this was the only difference between ghosts and saints. We want the saints to return to us. We long to see them emerge from the dark, ache for their restless touch. Natalie drew in trembling breath after trembling breath and tried vainly to transmute her horror into faith.” Through this deep grief, we see how Claira’s sister desperately wants to cling to the idea that her sister’s body has been preserved for a greater purpose in contrast with the reality of her loss.
“Esther and the Voice” plays with the idea of preserved consciousness. When Esther finds that the AI program she’s been training has begun to mimic the language and tone of her late wife, she is unsettled and angry, yet she can’t bring herself to remove the pieces of accidental code. She knows “that it isn’t Gina, that it’s a terrible echo that anybody who respected Gina’s memory would want gone from the world, but she cannot make herself erase it, can’t deliberately choose to never hear Gina’s voice again.” Like Claira, Gina’s consciousness has taken on an identity beyond her living self and has acquired new life in the shape of artificial intelligence. There is both love and heartbreak as Esther comes to accept that she cannot keep this version of Gina to herself. Through this, readers see the ways we are haunted by the fragmented traces of the dead through memories, media, and mementos. These reminders hold both comfort and heartache as they are an unsatisfactory replacement for more time with the one we lost.
Olguín masterfully incorporates fantasy with historical and modern realism in a way that resonates with the tone of a dark fairy tale. The characters’ desires are well within reach but come at a terrible cost. As the characters pursue their deepest desires, their happiness comes at a price. In “Foam on the Waves,” a reimagining of the ‘Little Mermaid,’ Aurelia barters away her voice to fulfill her dream of becoming a mermaid. The witch warns her, “You shall have your way, though it will bring you to sorrow.” While Aurelia finds peace in her new life, Olguín does not let us forget the effects Aurelia’s dreams have on others, whose happiness is sacrificed in favor of hers.
But the writer dives further into the dynamics of desire and tragedy in “Princess Wants for Company.” Here Olguín creates a uniquely modern queer fairy tale where dragons lurk on the periphery of the story while the metaphorical princesses, a babysitter and lonely new mother, are confined to the house while the beasts roam free. As the babysitter harbors romantic interest for the baby’s mother, she notes that, “She understands these stories. Any girl crazy enough to fall in love with another girl is doomed to suicide or madness, and both spell death for a woman. Tragedy is the world’s punishment for sin,” which acts as an apt omen for what is to come when the dragons come to claim their price. These stories capture the transformative nature of desire and how it allows us to transform and embrace our true selves, yet Olguin maintains the darker warnings of a grimm fairytale and this transformation turns monstrous when women fail to be maternal, or demure.
As the stories in The Sea Gives up the Dead explore intimate portrayals of grief and longing, the collection as a whole grapples with what we owe the dead, and what we owe ourselves. These raw moments of heartbreak, where the characters’ desires are laid bare, feel uniquely human. And unease or subtle horror carry through many of the stories, there is also a sense of transformation. While the stories don’t offer happy fairytale endings, there is a sense of closure as Olguín’s characters linger in the liminal space between anger and acceptance, reshaped by the reality of their loss.
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Sitting With the Lost: An Exploration of Grief and Longing in The Sea Gives Up the Dead by Molly Olguín
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Mike Norris from Pexels
Corrine Watson is a freelance writer and editor based in Charlotte, NC. Her work has appeared in Wretched Creations and the Southern Review of Books. Follow her on X @CorrineWatson6.
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