The stories in The Sea Gives Up the Dead, Molly Olguín’s debut collection, are remarkable for the ways in which they skate between the weird and the mundane, the ordinary and the out-of-the-question, never wholly letting on whether the wild events they portray are truly extraordinary or are, rather, everyday events that have been generously embellished. 

The opening story, “Seven Deaths,” begins with the unlikely news that “Roque Contreras and his family died seven times in three years, with only one grave to show for it.” The first death occurs when Roque’s son, Steve, is crushed beneath a speeding car. Steve knows how angry his father will be when he learns of his carelessness and what has resulted from it. To evade his father’s ire, he claws his way back to life, wrenching himself out from under the vehicle, and hurries home, where he conceals his injuries from his parents, insisting that, despite what they have heard, he did not die. 

With this death’s retraction, the story seems to turn speculative, as members of this family start to defy death and evade eternity. But the next death occurs when a child who was raised in early life as a girl—the mother had always wanted a daughter—witnesses the birth of a younger sister and is drawn to embrace his biological gender: “Esther became Albert, and so there were two births that day and only one death.” The death of Esther is figurative, then—but it is also as literal as the sister’s birth, as the identity previously imposed on Albert is abruptly shed with the newborn’s arrival.

The stories are largely concerned with matters of birth and death. “Clara Aguilera’s Holy Lungs” depicts the aftermath of the appearance of the title character’s immaculate corpse. Soon after her death, fully intact lungs turn up in lobster traps and on distant beaches. Those who discover them insist they are somehow hers. There is talk of her being canonized; as her organs return from the dead, they come to be seen as holy miracles. Her sister, meanwhile, dreads her dead sibling’s return. Huddling in desperate fear,“Natalie drew in trembling breath after trembling breath and tried vainly to transmute her horror into faith.” 

In a way, the story is a suspenseful dramatization of the very dilemma that all these stories present. While Olguín’s stories offer sufficient reason to believe that the impossible is taking place in them, they also assert that are merely showing us how reality, when seen in all its weird impossibility, can challenge our perception of what is possible. “Small Monuments” begins like a work of speculative fiction: “The love of Maria’s life died and sent herself to an oven in Chicago, where she was baked into a diamond.” But being baked into a diamond is, of course, a real thing that some people like to have done with their corpses. Events in these stories often sound wild and unreal, but some of them are, in fact, true to life, and readily described in ways that provoke incredulity.

The consistently excellent stories in this collection present choices between faith and doubt, between taking these fictions to be speculative or perceiving their reality as mundane but full of characters who believe in the impossible. The Sea Gives Up the Dead is both a fascinating exploration of how far a short story can stretch ambiguity and a multi-faceted series of expertly crafted fictions.

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Winner of the 2023 Grace Paley Prize, queer writer, educator, and monster aficionado Molly Olguín writes literary fantasy and horror. Her stories have appeared in Quarterly West and The Normal School. She was the recipient of the Loft Mentor Series Fellowship in 2019. With Jackie Hedeman, she is the creator of the audio drama The Pasithea Powder. She teaches English and creative writing to high school students in Seattle, Washington.

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Robert Long Foreman’s most recent books are Weird Pig and I Am Here to Make Friends. He lives in Kansas City and at www.robertlongforeman.com.