Underlake: A Guest Post by Erin L. McCoy

This spellbinding story follows two women who journey into the depths of a nearby lake and discover a surreal world unlike anything they’ve ever encountered before. Rea don for an exclusive essay from Erin L. McCoy on writing Underlake.

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When a mother claims her missing daughter is alive beneath a lake in a flooded valley, a marine biologist descends into a hidden underwater settlement where those who refused to leave have built a sealed-off world—and where the consequences of that choice are beginning to surface.

Underlake was born of a single image: a house submerged. Its lights glowed through the spiraling silt, the water on all sides a boundary too dangerous to cross. What if you’d spent years, decades, a lifetime inside this house? How might your worldview take shape based on the particularities of its construction, the furniture, the all-surrounding thrum of water, the people there with you, the pictures on the wall? The occupants of this house, in isolation, were likely to construct their own version of the world entirely distinct from anyone else’s.  

Near where I grew up in rural Kentucky, the remnants of a town haunted beneath a manmade lake. Take a boat out on that lake, and the roofs might be only a few feet beneath the surface; dive in and a chimney might lie just inches shy of your kicking feet—but through the green fog of algal overgrowth, impossible to see. I carried that town with me for years, along with the vague sensation that I had actually lived inside it: a small enclave cut off from the rest of the world, with its own myths and dogmas and minor tyrants.

There was an era in the mid-twentieth century in which undersea living seized the public imagination. Many tried and failed to achieve it, among them Jacques Cousteau and the U.S. Navy. I began to ask, if it were technically possible, what would the cultural and social impacts be on those living underwater? And who would choose such a life? The latter became a driving question of the book.

Two characters emerged at the center of my story: Otta, a failed marine biologist, and May, who had grown up in an Underlake community and now needed Otta’s help to dive deeper beneath the water in search of her missing daughter. At the time, I was juggling my own sense of failure, having not yet published the book I had dreamed all my life of publishing. I was seeking purpose amid devastation. Like Otta, I wondered what could possibly come next.

With Underlake, I set out to write a literary novel like the ones I admire most: atmospheric, immersive, and propelled by the quality of its language. I wanted characters who were complete and flawed human beings, and sought to explore themes of grief, religious trauma, and inheritance. But what surprised me most was the propulsive plot that emerged, laced with elements of magical realism, science fiction, and even adventure. I hope that readers find it genuinely hard to put this book down. But my goal is also that Underlake compels them to ask questions about what societal and political conditions have driven so much fracture—why so many Americans have shifted toward isolation, echo chambers, and extremism. This tendency is deeply rooted in our history, in the stories that we tell. Across so many kinds of distance, Otta and May find each other. Underlake asks whether we can do the same.