Imagine that Hans Christian Anderson has finally reached his limit with the various ‘Disney-fied’ adaptations of his story, “The Little Mermaid”, and mentions his frustration to Winslow Homer, Charles Dickens and H.P. Lovecraft over drinks up in Heaven. All agree and contribute ideas for a re-write. And perhaps they’ve funneled their vision through Samantha Hunt, and, thus, her first novel, The Seas, might have been born.

Samantha Hunt writes as if her pen were a sable paintbrush. Though we never know the name of our heroine/protagonist, we see her plainly and vividly, a waif of a soul living in a northern seacoast town where ‘The highway only goes south from here’. With rocky coastal beaches, frozen water and not much else, a bleak future lies ahead for anyone unfortunate to live there. And while this young woman is aware of her salt-of-the-earth lineage, she has come to believe she’s unlike anyone else in the town. She believes she is a mermaid.

The catalyst for this belief is her father’s disappearance eleven years before when he walked into the ocean and never came back. While the rest of the town accepts this as suicide, the young woman’s mother still waits for her missing husband to return. This, in turn, only strengthens the young woman’s conviction. In her mind, she reasons that if her father is alive, then he must be a creature of the sea and, therefore, she must be a mermaid as he had commented many years before.

As with Anderson’s mermaid, there is a prince, Jude, only he has been served a fate not unlike a character from a Dicken’s tale. A veteran of the Gulf War, he is an alcoholic womanizer who carries a secret that is tearing him apart. Our young woman yearns for him and offers herself openly, only to be shunned. And, we all know the fate that awaits a mermaid who cannot win the love of her prince.

Hunt portrays the conflicts and confusion of the young heroine convincingly through the use of first person. There is an ethereal quality to her vibrant prose, which fluctuates between the earthly and mythical worlds of the main character’s mind. Despite the mystical elements, the angst and the reality of the hard circumstances are always as sharp as the jagged rocks of a cliffwalk. The Seas is a mesmerizing story, one that draws you in like a soft September undertow and it’s not until you feel the chill of the deep ocean that you realize how far from shore you are.