This mystical short story collection housed a variety of engaging, tragic stories centered around love and loss through a wide array of relationship dynamics. Each story is full of vivid images and compelling characters. Not a new favorite but well worth a read.

This decadent short story collection truly felt like a selection of modern fairy tales worth savoring. I marathoned them because I didn't want to stop reading, but I never wanted the book to end, which is high praise for a short story collection—I just wanted them to keep coming.

While some short stories prioritize big twists or tidy resolutions, these are more lingering experiences. To me, it felt like each ends at the perfect spot—even if sometimes I wanted more—but if you're someone who looks for twists or oomph, this might not be your kind of collection. But if you're looking for stories that will transport you, make you think, and stick with you, absolutely pick this up. I'm definitely getting a physical copy!

(Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ebook copy! All opinions are, of course, my own.)

3.5 stars rounded up

oh how i wish these last two stories were full novels! as often with short story collections, i really enjoyed about half of them and could not really get into the other half. but the ones i liked, i liked so much that i really want to delve into more of Olguín's writing. the style was very evocative and so well-suited to horror. as it always happens, some stories left me thinking that there wasn't enough for me to grasp much or to care about the story/characters, but i would happily read full novels about my favourites of the bunch, despite them still feeling like they accomplished what they set out to do.

all in all, i enjoyed this collection very much and i am very glad that i stumbled upon it on NetGalley, i would definitely recommend!! do be mindful of the trigger warnings though, as some of the subjects are particularly sensitive.

my favourite stories
📖 Foam on the Waves
📖 The Sea Gives Up the Dead
📖 My Husband and Me
📖 The Princess Wants for Company
📖 Small Monuments

— thank you NetGalley for providing a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A whimsical group of tales. Lighthearted and leaning toward historical fiction, with sometimes fantastical elements. Very solid collection I will recommend widely! LGBTQIA+ rep and monster heavy, so very much my jam. Less horror than my norm.

This debut collection blends myth, grief, and queerness in a lyrical, haunting way. Stories like “Seven Deaths” and “Foam on the Waves” stood out, offering emotional weight and poetic prose. But overall, the pacing was inconsistent, and some stories felt underdeveloped or ended abruptly. While I admired the themes and voice, the impact was hit-or-miss. A promising debut, just not quite as cohesive as I’d hoped.

Winner of the 2023 Grace Paley Prize, writer, educator, and monster lover Molly Olguín writes literary fantasy and horror. I loved this book of short stories that are a blend of magical realism, fairy tale retellings, and horror. This book is hard to describe (and hard to put down) but is similar to Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado and Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell. The stories range far and wide exploring everything from the loss of a sister to sainthood, to dragons and mermaids, and the way AI can be used to numb grief, to the idea of the dead punishing living from beyond the grave. Read it!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me an ARC of this book for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

As with most short story collections, there are some stories in this one that affected me deeply and were profoundly memorable. I would say most in this collection did so. But then there are other stories in the collection that simply fade into the background to be forgotten fairly quickly. I will go through the stories and give a few thoughts. It is worth noting that I finished this collection a few days ago, so some stories will not be very fresh to me. Without further ado, here are my thoughts:

Seven Deaths: This was one story in this collection that I found very heavy and emotional. The various ways that family members die, whether a literal or metaphorical death, made for a very interesting exploration of grief and generational trauma.

Devils Also Believe: This story caught my attention because of the titular "devil" character and her thoughts about the goings on around her. I think the writing was interesting, but it did not strike me quite as much as the previous story.

The Princess Wants for Company: I loved the concept of this sapphic magical realism story. It was sweet and entertaining!

The Undertaker's Dogs: Very visceral at times, but the prose was not very memorable.

honey from the rock: Short and unfortunately forgettable because its length did not allow for enough detail in the story.

Clara Agulera's Holy Lungs: By far my favorite story of the bunch! I'm a sucker for stories that comment on religion and miracles, which was a central focus of this story. The way this story depicted how Clara Aguilera was treated like an object of religious fascination instead of a young girl who died tragically and is deserving of proper burial and respect was so interesting.

My Husband and Me: Also very visceral at times. This one provided an interesting exploration of martial fidelity in the age of technology and the ways that lines between humans and technology blur.

Small Monuments: In complete honesty, I do not remember what this one is about very well. Serves me right for not taking the time to write a review sooner! Alas, it evidently did not stick.

Captain America's Missing Fingers: A bizarre little story that was a great exploration of war and family trauma and how children deal with such events.

Esther and the Voice: Wow, this one cut deep. It is a tragic tale of queer love lost, and the lengths Esther would go to in order to feel like her beloved is with her again. Some great commentary on technology here.

The Sea Gives Up the Dead: My second favorite in the collection. I really enjoyed this story's message of accepting your children's journeys as a parent and that doing so can prevent serious regret later in life.

Foam on the Waves: A Little Mermaid retelling. Not my favorite because I do get tired of retellings of that story, but it was good as far as retellings go.

A collection of slightly odd and eerie short stories covering a number of different genres, exploring love, death and grief. This book has beautiful cover art, which is what initially drew me to it.

My favourite were:
📖 The Princess Wants For Company
📖My Husband and Me
📖 Small Monuments - my absolute favourite story about a woman who ensures she survives forever, following her own death
📖 Captain America's Missing Fingers

I enjoyed this unusual collection of short stories, some more than others and would recommend it as an interesting read for those that enjoy
something a little different. Thank you to NetGalley and Red Hen Press for the opportunity to read and review this book.

The Sea Gives Up the Dead is queer, folkloric, violent, tender, and deeply weird in all the right ways. There’s a dragon-slaying nanny, a girl who drowns and becomes a saint, kids plotting to blow up their dad, mermaids, witches, grief, love, longing...it’s a lot, but it works, I swear! Some stories I loved more than others, but that’s part of the charm with collections like this.

If you like your literary fiction a little dark, a little gay, and a lot unhinged, this one’s for you.

Thanks to Red Hen Press and NetGalley for the ARC.

"The Sea Gives Up the Dead" is a collection of short horror stories that almost feels like a weird little love letter to Los Angeles. Olguin doesn't shy away from difficult themes surrounding death, prejudice, abuse, toxic relationship dynamics, and loneliness. Instead, she approaches them through a lens of pain and improbability, carefully selecting narrators whose points of view have the highest potential for maximum impact.

A few favorites:

1. The Princess Wants for Company — for my "dragon slayer" girlies
2. Small Monuments — for my "love lasts forever" girlies
3. The Sea Gives Up the Dead — for my "I always loved you, son" girlies
4. Foam on the Waves — for my "fairy-tale endings" girlies

Very nice story collection that got me thinking a lot. There is not a lot of closure in the stories which makes me think about the ending and what really happened. I loved this!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

The Sea Gives Up the Dead by Molly Olguin is a collection of short stories with a fairytale feel and a dark, haunting vibe. Death is a big theme throughout, which adds a creepy, horror-like tone to the stories.

Each story is different, with unique plots and ideas, which I liked. Some stood out more than others, and a few really caught my attention. But for the most part, the stories felt like they were building up to something and then just stopped. There wasn’t much payoff or closure, which left me a bit unsatisfied.

I liked the atmosphere and the creativity, but many of the stories just didn’t click with me. Still, I can see other readers enjoying the dreamy, eerie style and open-ended storytelling.

Thanks to the and Red Hen Press for providing the arc via NetGalley.

This is one of the best story collections I have read in a while. Usually in a short story collection there are one or two stories I really like and will remember after a month, and the rest are more filler than anything else. This book, however, was almost entirely stories I will probably remember in a month, and that I enjoyed a lot while reading them. I think my favorite is the Little Mermaid retelling, but several other stories are tied for my second favorite. Definitely a book worth reading.

4.5 stars

Such a delightfully strange and morbid series of short stories.

These quirky stories all feature the spectre of death in some way; some feel more historical while others are refreshingly modern. There's also an undercurrent of sexual tension in a lot of these stories, mostly of the lesbian variety (I believe the author does identify as a queer author) but none of it feels gratuitous or shocking, just snippets of lives being lived and lives coming to an end. I really don't want to spoil the book by discussing too much of it here; suffice it to say each story had its own distinct flavour and comedic/macabre appeal.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading through this book; I'm quite partial to short stories these days because they feel more easily digestible than full novels. The stories here are plenty digestible but be warned, they may continue to sit with you long after you've finished reading.

Thanks to NetGalley, author Molly Olguin, and Red Hen Press for giving me access to a free digital ARC of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own and are provided here voluntarily.

This is a collection of 12 short stories, mostly in the realm of fantasy(/horror), though some stories also seem literary.
I picked this up solely based on the title, disregarding that I am not the biggest fan of fairytales. And most of these are definitely modern fairy tales, although often the endings were lacking. The writing style did not engage me. It felt very descriptive, but at the same time quite distanced.
My favorite story by far is the penultimate and titular „The Sea Gives Up the Dead“, probably because it felt less like classical folklore.

In a Nutshell: A short story collection interspersing fantasy and horror into a mesmerising combo. Precise writing, intriguing characters, compelling plots. Had all the endings worked for me, this would have ended up as one of my favourites of the year. Regardless, the imaginative and distinct storylines still make this book a good option for short fiction lovers.

This collection of twelve stories doesn’t have any author’s note to introduce the binding theme to us. However, the blurb has this interesting one-liner to offer: ‘a collection of stories sprinkled into the soil of fairy tale, left to take root and grow wild there.’ How poetic is that!
The dominant genre is fantasy-horror, but many stories also feel literary. Each of the tales has a fresh storyline, generating no feelings of déjà vu or familiarity. The narratives are distinct in plot, characters as well as emotions. The characters are especially memorable, as their flawed behaviour and their conundrums add much value to the basic plot.
As the title indicates, death has a strong role to play in this collection. Whether it is the literal death of the main character or the figurative death of a marriage, macabre thoughts about dying or plans of killing someone, death makes an appearance in every story, making this book morbidly fascinating. Do note that there are shades of horror to many stories, and the death include those of children and animals as well.
Though some of the stories have unreal elements such as magical occurrences or fantastical creatures like dragons or mermaids, the overall book still feels rooted in reality. And this is mainly because of the depiction of human emotions in every single tale. Spanning a wide array of feelings ranging from love to hatred, frustration to longing, bravery to cowardice, the collection offers an amazing insight into the human mind and its complicated working.
The writing is quite powerful. As the stories are character-oriented, there is a lot of introspection in the content. But this doesn’t come at the cost of the descriptive add-ons. It is very easy to visualise every scene, even when the visual is bizarre. Further, the pacing is also quite fast, a rarity for such a writing approach.
The main reason why my rating couldn’t touch greater heights was the endings. A few of the stories ended at an apt point, but many endings didn’t work for me. They weren’t abrupt as such, but they weren’t satisfying either, leaving me longing for more clarity or closure.
As always, I rated the stories individually. Of the twelve stories, two reached/crossed four stars. Most of the rest earned 3.5 stars, and at least half of these would have earned more stars had they offered me a satisfactory finale. The two best stories of the books for me were:
⚰️ Seven Deaths: A wildly crazy story that had me hooked from start to finish. - ⭐⭐⭐⭐✨
⚰️ Captain America's Missing Fingers: When a little girl realises that the world behaves differently with little boys. Sad, really sad. Would have earned a higher rating with a better ending. - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Overall, though the endings somewhat sullied my experience, I still liked this collection for its innovative plotlines and diverse characters. I find it tough to accept that this is a debut work. The author’s pen holds much promise, and I’d love to read more of her works in future.
Recommended to short story fans who enjoy fantasy-horror, are comfortable with a literary writing style and don’t need solid endings.
3.2 stars, based on the average of my ratings for each story.
My thanks to Red Hen Press for providing the DRC of “The Sea Gives Up the Dead” via NetGalley & Edelweiss+. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

As with most short stories there were some I liked more than others, I enjoyed that the theme of death followed each story and how each disseminated it differently.

This book...I went in blind and it took the 2nd story to understand that this is a collection of short stories with death as the theme: how a death affected the main characters of the stories. It's a bit depressing really, with a small twist in each of the stories, as well as an odd one or two story thrown in. It's written well though I am thankful they are short as I don't think I'll be able to finish a full novel of each of the short stories.

I was originally drawn to this book due to it's beautiful cover, and realising it was a short story collection made me even more excited. I'm a massive fan of weird little short story collections and 'The Sea Gives Up The Dead' did not disappoint.

The collection focuses on grief and death, with each story focusing on a different kind of death, blending in fantasy and folktale elements to make each story truly unique. The stories were extremely well paced and well written, with the characters feeling really fleshed out- I particularly enjoyed 'Small Monuments' and 'Esther and The Voice' as these stories are crafted so wonderfully that you fully understand both the main characters and characters that you never actually meet.

I think there really is something for everyone in this collection- if you're looking for fantasy, sci-fi, magical realism, contemporary fiction or horror they'll be at least one story in the collection for you! A fantastic debut from Molly Olguín and I can't wait to see what comes next from them.

Thank you to Red Hen Press and NetGalley for the chance to read this DRC. This review can be viewed on my Goodreads page at the following link: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/177713825-megan-carr

I love short stories generally, but the collections that really grab my attention are those that blend the real with the fantastical, the painful with the hopeful, and the joy of living with the grief of it all. I didn't know what to expect going into The Sea Gives Up the Dead, but Molly Olguín had my full attention by the end of the first page. Thanks to Red Hen Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

One of the things Olguín achieves in this collection which astounded me was that, while each story was its own, coherent thing, all the stories together somehow created a cohesive whole. It's not as if characters from one story populate another, or that locations are revisited, or even that the same message is repeated over and over, rather there is something seamless to how Olguín moves from one story to the other. All together, they create a world that is technically human and yet holds marvels around every corner. This could be love, unexpectedly, but also a dragon. You could lose your loved ones because of a war or to a apocalyptic flood, have them returned to you as a corpse or still breathing. All throughout, Olguín infuses her world with elements from fairy tales and magical realism, but it also feels, to me at least, deeply grounded in the melting pot that America actually is. The stories in The Sea Gives Up the Dead all, in their own way, deal with the question of finding a sense of family and connection in a very hectic world and Olguín finds these moments by looking at everyone and giving them a place in her world.

Collections can be a mixed bag because there will almost always be at least one story that doesn't entirely hit. With The Sea Gives Up the Dead, however, every single story gave me something to connect to, something to think about, some imagery to dwell on for the next weeks. The collection contains twelve stories and although I can't discuss them all in detail here, they all are worth mentioning. The opener 'Seven Deaths' is a great attention-grabber, exploring death and family dynamics through an immigrant family. These themes echo throughout the entire collection. 'Devils Also Believe' is a heartbreaker of a story about, you guessed it, death and family dynamics, but also religion and friendship. 'The Princess Wants for Company' mixes fantasy with queer love, while commenting on class. 'The Undertaker's Dogs' is not for those who need to check Does the Dog Die before watching a film. 'Honey from the Rock' is very brief, two pages or so, but it has wormed its way into my head regardless. 'Clara Aguilera's Holy Lungs' is a stand-out for me, going from cataclysmic disaster to loss of a family member to discussions of sainthood, all with a lovely dose of body horror. 'My Husband and Me' is a "Dear Abby" kind of letter which honestly horrified me with its exploration of intimacy in a technological world. 'Small Monuments' is a story of queer love and revenge which had me both chortling and going "Oh no". 'Captain America's Missing Fingers' explores war, trauma, and family and is touching in its depiction of children's perspectives and experiences of these themes. 'Esther and The Voice' was one of my favourites, exploring what it means to be alive, memory, AI, and grief. 'The Sea Gives Up the Dead' sees a mother try to retrieve her son's body from France, only to be confronted with the reality of how she raised him. 'Foam on the Waves' is a beautiful retelling of 'The Little Mermaid' which nails the undersea aesthetic and the desire to be other than one is.

Molly Olguín won me over pretty much from page one. This was my first time reading anything by her but I am adding anything else she writes to my "read now please" list. All of the stories in this collection contain moments and lines that will make you do a double take and snort, but these are followed up by moments and lines that made me want to stare at the ceiling for a bit. The Sea Gives Up the Dead is a beautiful blend of a variety of genres. As mentioned above, the fantastical and the fairy tale get their turn, but so do elements of horror and suspense. Throughout it I felt that I did get a good sense of Olguín's voice, of the ideas she had in mind, the messages she wanted to convey. With the genre-switching as well as hopping between different moods, it consistently felt as if Olguín was in control of her craft and nothing felt out of place or unnecessary to me. I became so deeply attached to many of her characters, precisely because I also got the feeling that Olguín poured a lot of care and attention into crafting them into messy but real people. Some make horrible choices, others understandable ones, and behind it all is a true, genuine search for love and understanding. I can't wait to read more by Olguín!

I absolutely adored these stories by Olguín as they are the perfect blend between deeply insightful, fantastical, and utterly creepy! For those looking for a slightly different short story or a whole collection that is excellently crafted, The Sea Gives Up the Dead is it.