The Sea Beast Takes a Lover: Stories

“This debut author rightfully earns his place on the storytelling totem pole with this wildly original short story collection.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Dazzling and delightful, with its feet only slightly tethered to the world we know, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover explores family, faith, and longing through a kaleidoscope of surreal landscapes and spellbinding characters.

Andreasen's stories unfold in wildly inventive worlds that invite the supernatural into our familiar routines: in “Bodies in Space,” an extramarital affair is rudely interrupted by an alien abduction, while in “Blunderbuss,” a third-grade class takes an ill-advised field trip to a floundering time travel institute. “Jenny” follows a reluctant caretaker's attempts to manage his kind-hearted headless sister, and in the title story, a group of sailors find their ship commandeered by an aggressively lovestruck kraken.

Romping through the fantastic with bighearted ease, these stories uncover a universal yearning for connection in seldom-explored spaces, revealing that aliens can help us think about loss, that time travel is just another way to talk about guilt, and that sea monsters may have a thing or two to teach us about love.

With a captivating new voice from an immensely talented storyteller, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover uses the odd, the extraordinary, and the miraculous to expose us at our most profoundly and hilariously human.