The Sea Gives Up The Dead

A faded photograph of an almost-empty beach. In the distance are two teenaged girls wearing long red dresses and black jackets. They are too far away to make out their expressions, but they appear to be looking at the camera. They cast a long shadow.
Personal Photo

The Sea Gives Up The Dead is a collection of short fiction set in Los Angeles. Moored by southern California and a shared obsession with the magical unpredictability of grief, the stories drift through time and genre. Magical realism, historical fiction, science fiction, and literary realism operate as different facets of the same prism, offering brief flashes into the same world.

The stories visit Olay Bay in 1912, Rancho Palos Verdes in 1955, San Pedro in the 1930s, the colonial pueblo by the river Porciuncula, a future Los Angeles devastated by a meteor sent hurtling towards the earth. They share a fairytale sense of the uncanny, and are marked by grief and unnatural death: a teenaged girl is revered as a saint after dying in a natural disaster, a child bargains for her mother’s life at the height of the Spanish Influenza, a nanny has her charge stolen by a dragon, a scientist accidentally resurrects her lover as an artificial intelligence.

Stories from The Sea Gives Up The Dead have appeared in RedividerQuarterly WestBetwixt, Zymbol, and The Normal School, River Styx and Fugue.

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