Men Who Wish to Drown by Elizabeth Fama

Men Who Wish to Drown by Elizabeth Fama
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Historical
Length: Short Story (19 pages)
Heat Level: Sweet
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Cited as the only extant firsthand record of a mermaid encounter in New England waters, this deathbed letter from a great-grandfather to his great-grandson is more likely an instructive fiction–a parable of regret. Supposedly corroborating the mermaid story, a ship’s log (in the collections of the Provincetown Historical Museum) of the schooner Hannah, which plucked Mr. Stanton from South Weepecket in 1788, indicates that the crew saw two figures on the island prior to his rescue, but failed to locate a second victim. However, regarding accuracy and reliability, this is the same crew, under Captain John Merriweather, that reported sightings of a ghost ship and not one, but two sea monsters. ~~James S. Rucker, Archivist, Family Collections, Falmouth Historical Society, 1924.

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Regret isn’t an emotion that I’ve seen explored very often in the fantasy genre, so I was intrigued by this tale immediately. It explored the main character’s experiences with this feeling in great detail. The fact that it was written in the form of a letter only intensified the pacing because of how much effort the narrator put into describing what had happened and what he wished his life could have been like instead. He only had a limited amount of space to describe what happened, and he used every single inch of it.

There was only one small thing I wish had been written differently, and it had to do with how a certain character was described. The narrator’s first description of this character was quite different from how he later described her to the audience. I was slightly surprised by this change and would have liked to see a bit of foreshadowing for it since his opinions changed so drastically. With that being said, this is a very minor criticism of something I’ll otherwise be recommending far and wide.

The romantic elements of the plot were written beautifully. When I started the first page, I wondered how the main character was supposed to transition from barely surviving a dangerous accident to falling in love with a stranger. Those two ideas occupied such different parts of my imagination that I couldn’t imagine them being mixed together, so I was delighted by how the author played around with thoughts related to life, the very real threat of a senseless death, despair, and love so deftly that they all felt like they truly did belong together.

Men Who Wish to Drown is a must-read for anyone who loves mermaids.