Introduction
Gwendolyn Maia Hicks’s “Full Fathom Five” represents an ambitious merger of Irish folklore and contemporary working-class realism, exploring intergenerational trauma through the lens of speculative fiction. Published as the author continues to establish their literary presence—having attended the Clarion Workshop and Lambda Literary Retreat, with work appearing in genre publications like Uncanny and Heartlines Spec—this 8,815-word novelette demonstrates Hicks’s investment in what might be termed “emotional speculative fiction.” The story follows Jack Kersey, a struggling young man in a declining British fishing town, as he encounters Cóemchuachma, a merrow (Irish sea creature) who collects the souls of the dead. While the premise risks sentimentality, Hicks largely succeeds in creating a moving meditation on grief, economic desperation, and the dangerous allure of remaining tethered to the past. The story’s greatest achievement lies in its integration of folkloric elements with carefully observed social realism, though its resolution occasionally sacrifices narrative complexity for emotional catharsis.
Plot Summary and Context
Set in a economically depressed British coastal town during what appears to be the early 1990s recession, “Full Fathom Five” centers on Jack Kersey, a twenty-four-year-old working intermittent fishing jobs after his father Thomas’s death from cancer five years prior. The narrative opens with Jack accidentally catching Cóemchuachma in a fishing net and releasing them, an act of mercy that initiates their supernatural bargain. The merrow claims to recognize Jack’s soul as similar to his father’s—both characterized by foddiaght, a Manx word the merrow defines as “longing for a place that never was, a place that cannot be.” Cóemchuachma reveals they collect souls marked by this particular longing, transforming them into lobsters kept in cages within a sunken warship. When Jack discovers his father’s soul among these captives, he must choose between the seductive oblivion Cóemchuachma offers and the difficult work of living.
The story’s denouement involves Jack’s friends Trishna and Dexter, along with his younger brother Gareth, helping him descend to free his father’s soul. Though Cóemchuachma curses Jack and nearly drowns him, Gareth dives in to rescue his brother, and Jack releases his father’s soul to its proper rest. The story concludes with Jack choosing life and connection over the paralysis of unresolved grief.
Thematic Analysis
Hicks’s central thematic concern is the relationship between grief and stagnation, particularly as experienced by working-class young men in post-industrial Britain. Jack’s character embodies what Lauren Berlant might call “cruel optimism”—his attachment to his father’s memory provides neither comfort nor closure, yet he cannot release it. The story diagnoses this condition as both psychological and economic: Jack’s inability to move forward stems equally from unprocessed trauma and from material circumstances that offer no viable future. His serial job losses, mentioned almost casually (“his sixth job in three months”), situate personal paralysis within systemic failure.
The merrow’s foddiaght—longing for impossible places—functions as the story’s organizing principle. This concept resonates with Raymond Williams’s notion of structures of feeling, capturing the affective experience of deindustrialization. Jack’s father, a shipyard worker, represents a generation whose labor built vessels they would “never board,” a poignant image of working-class alienation. The sunken destroyer housing Cóemchuachma’s collection literalizes this: military-industrial ruins transformed into supernatural archives of unfulfilled desire. That these souls become lobsters—creatures associated with both luxury consumption and the fishing industry—adds further socioeconomic resonance.
Hicks also explores masculinity and emotional articulation. Jack’s relationships with Dexter, Trishna, and Gareth reveal his struggle to accept care and express need. The story’s most affecting moments occur when Jack confronts his inability to grieve properly: “How do you miss what was never there?” Gareth asks, articulating the particular pain of mourning a emotionally absent parent. Jack’s realization that he can live “a long life even if you are not in it anymore” represents hard-won psychological growth, though the narrative’s insistence on this insight risks didacticism.
Form and Style
Hicks employs third-person limited narration focused tightly on Jack’s perspective, a choice that grounds the folkloric material in gritty realism. The prose alternates between Jack’s working-class vernacular—“shit enough and thrice as big,” “owt”—and more lyrical passages describing the underwater realm. This stylistic oscillation mirrors the story’s thematic concern with navigating between mundane survival and mythic possibility.
The narrative structure relies heavily on analepsis, with Jack’s memories of his father interrupting the present action. While these flashbacks provide necessary context, their placement sometimes feels calculated rather than organic. The memory of Jack’s father teaching him about fishing (“All of life is like that, you’ll soon learn—just you mind that you’re the hook, and not the fish”) arrives with obvious symbolic weight, and the final flashback to Jack’s mother teaching him to swim borders on over-determination.
Hicks’s imagery consistently links water with both danger and origin, death and birth. The opening epigraph from The Tempest—“Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made”—establishes the Shakespearean precedent for transformation through drowning, though Hicks complicates Ariel’s song by refusing simple metamorphosis. Jack’s father doesn’t become “something rich and strange”; he becomes trapped, requiring active liberation.
The merrow’s language deserves particular attention. Hicks incorporates Manx Gaelic phrases and archaic English constructions (”’Tis,” “soothly,” “aalin”) to mark Cóemchuachma as temporally and culturally other. This linguistic choice successfully evokes Irish folklore while risking incomprehensibility. Phrases like “Shen eh, I see the waves of grief and goodness there” require contextual interpretation, creating productive estrangement without complete opacity.
Characterization
Jack functions less as a fully individuated character than as a type: the working-class young man adrift in late capitalism. His dyslexia, mentioned briefly, adds texture without being developed thematically. His bisexuality, implied through the flashback to kissing Dexter, similarly remains subtext rather than explicit character development. These elements suggest Hicks’s awareness of intersecting marginalizations without fully exploring them.
Cóemchuachma presents a more complex figure. Unlike traditional merrows in Irish folklore—often gendered female and associated with seduction—Hicks’s merrow is non-binary (the text carefully shifts from “it” to “they”) and motivated by aesthetic appreciation rather than predation. Their collection of souls reads as curatorship, even care, making them neither villain nor savior. When Cóemchuachma asks Jack to “stay, stay,” offering to make him “pretty here among them,” the temptation is genuine rather than purely malevolent. This moral ambiguity enriches the story beyond simple conflict.
The supporting characters—Trishna, Dexter, and Gareth—function primarily as Jack’s tethers to life and community. Trishna’s punk aesthetic (mohawk, time in London) signals escape and reinvention, though her return home for the holidays acknowledges the persistent pull of origin. Dexter’s steady reliability and his recitation of Yeats mark him as the story’s moral center, though he risks becoming an idealized figure of patient devotion. Gareth’s willingness to dive after Jack despite their father’s differential treatment provides the story’s emotional climax, literalizing the theme of chosen connection over inherited damage.
Cultural and Theoretical Context
“Full Fathom Five” participates in the growing body of working-class speculative fiction that uses fantastic elements to explore economic precarity. Authors like Sarah Gailey, Rivers Solomon, and Charlie Jane Anders have similarly employed genre conventions to examine structural inequality, and Hicks’s work extends this project into the specific context of British deindustrialization.
The story also engages with Irish and Manx folklore traditions while being written by an American author. This raises questions about cultural appropriation versus appreciation, though Hicks’s research appears thorough—the Manx Gaelic terms and folkloric details suggest genuine engagement with source material. The choice to set the story in Britain rather than Ireland or the Isle of Man may sidestep some concerns while creating others about the presumed universality of Celtic mythology.
From a queer theoretical perspective, the story’s treatment of Jack’s sexuality warrants further examination. The briefly depicted kiss with Dexter, Jack’s relationship with Trishna, and Dexter’s final message to Jack’s father all suggest queer subtext, yet the narrative never explicitly addresses this dimension of Jack’s identity. Whether this constitutes a lost opportunity or a deliberate choice to center class over sexuality remains interpretively open.
The story’s engagement with grief invites psychoanalytic reading. Cóemchuachma’s collection recalls Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia—the souls trapped as lobsters represent melancholic attachment, the inability to complete grief work. Jack’s release of his father’s soul thus enacts the labor of mourning, accepting loss rather than preserving the lost object. That this requires risking death himself suggests Hicks’s awareness of mourning’s dangers.
Evaluation
“Full Fathom Five” succeeds most convincingly in its atmospheric evocation of place and its emotional authenticity. Hicks captures the specific texture of struggling British coastal towns—the abandoned shipyards, the queue outside the Jobcentre, the pubs and standing tables—with economical precision. The underwater sequences balance wonder and threat effectively, creating genuine tension about Jack’s survival even as the narrative arc suggests his redemption.
The story’s emotional core—Jack’s confrontation with his father’s soul—largely earns its pathos. The image of Jack holding a lobster to his chest while crying, whispering “You damned old fool,” achieves genuine poignancy without excessive sentimentality. Hicks trusts the image to carry meaning without over-explanation.
However, the narrative occasionally sacrifices complexity for clarity. The resolution, while emotionally satisfying, arrives too neatly: Gareth saves Jack, Jack releases his father, and Jack chooses life, all within the story’s final pages. The speed of Jack’s psychological transformation from suicidal ideation (“I want you to drag me down to the deepest part of the world, and leave me there”) to affirmation (“I think I want to live”) strains credibility, even within the story’s fantastic frame.
The supporting characters, while vividly sketched, sometimes function more as symbolic positions than fully realized individuals. Trishna’s punk identity, Dexter’s gentle steadiness, and Gareth’s quiet resentment each represent possibilities for Jack without achieving full interiority. The story’s tight focus on Jack’s perspective partly explains this limitation, but more attention to these relationships might have enriched the thematic exploration of chosen family versus blood ties.
Hicks’s prose, generally strong, occasionally stumbles into cliché. Phrases like “his heart twisted left and right with indecision” or “a raw and sudden sob tears through his middle, rib by rib” rely on familiar formulations. The repeated use of “precious” to describe souls risks vagueness—what makes a soul precious, and to whom, deserves more precise articulation.
The story’s originality lies less in its individual elements—folklore-inspired contemporary fantasy, working-class protagonists, grief narratives—than in their synthesis. Hicks creates something genuinely affecting by refusing to separate economic analysis from emotional exploration, by insisting that Jack’s psychological paralysis cannot be understood apart from his material circumstances.
Conclusion
“Full Fathom Five” represents accomplished work from an emerging voice in speculative fiction. Hicks demonstrates facility with both folkloric material and social realism, creating a story that honors its genre conventions while pursuing serious thematic inquiry. The story’s exploration of grief, longing, and economic precarity resonates beyond its specific setting, speaking to broader contemporary anxieties about mobility, futurity, and belonging.
While the resolution’s tidiness and the occasional reliance on familiar emotional beats prevent the story from achieving masterwork status, Hicks’s integration of myth and materialism, their careful attention to place and class, and their emotional intelligence mark them as a writer worth sustained attention. The story succeeds in what appears to be its primary aim: making readers feel the weight of Jack’s grief and the hard-won nature of his survival.
Future scholarship might productively examine Hicks’s work within the context of contemporary Anthropocene fiction—the sunken warship as habitat, the transformation of industrial ruin into ecosystem, all suggest ecological concerns beneath the psychological surface. Similarly, comparative analysis with other contemporary retellings of Celtic folklore might illuminate Hicks’s particular contributions to this tradition.
“Full Fathom Five” confirms that speculative fiction remains a vital mode for exploring the most pressing questions of contemporary existence: How do we grieve what we’ve lost? How do we live in worlds offering no clear futures? How do we choose connection when isolation feels safer? Hicks offers no easy answers, but poses the questions with care, craft, and considerable emotional power.