The Leviathan’s Couch: Review of Megan Bontrager’s The Sea Hides Its Dead

JL George Under Review:The Sea Hides Its Dead. Megan Bontrager. Run for It, July 2026. The premise of Megan Bontrager’s The Sea Hides Its Dead sounds straight out of Lovecraft. A mysterious monolith rises from the sea, bearing traces of an ancient marine cult that worshipped an entity known as the Leviathan. A loosely organised expedition—three academics and a handful of other interested parties—heads out to investigate and gets lost in the mysterious, ever-changing interior of the monolith, its members experiencing strange visions before they inevitably meet their grisly ends. But readers expecting weird fiction, in either its classic or contemporary guise, may be disappointed. Rather, The Sea Hides its Dead sits firmly within the sizable tranche of modern horror where the real monster is trauma, grief, or both. Within that scope, it’s a solid if rather rote entry that treats its central trauma with care. It’s when the novel gestures at something more ambitious that the cracks—and…