MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK is the author of the nonfiction books Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, The Mad Feast, Preparing the Ghost, Pot Farm, and Barolo, as well as the poetry books The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Guernica, The New Republic, Iowa Review, Salon, Conjunctions, The Believer, and the Best Travel Writing and Best Food Writing anthologies. He’s a professor of creative writing in the Masters of Fine Arts Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is also the Nonfiction/Hybrids Editor of the literary magazine, Passages North.
An exquisite, lyrical foray into the world of deep-sea divers, the obsession and madness that oceans inspire in us, and the story of submarine inventor Peter Madsen's murder of journalist Kim Wall—a captivating blend of literary prose, science writing, and true crime
"[A] thrilling study of an obsession—to sink below the surface, to depths both metaphoric and in fact. Full of wild characters and strange histories, by the end we are convinced, in no small part by the beauty of [Frank's] language, that this is one of the most important stories ever told."—Nick Flynn, author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire
Submersed begins with an investigation into the beguiling subculture of DIY submersible obsessives: men and women—but mostly men—who are so compelled to sink into the deep sea that they become amateur backyard submarine-builders. Should they succeed in fashioning a craft in their garage or driveway and set sail, they do so at great personal risk—as the 2023 fatal implosion of Stockton Rush's much more highly funded submarine, Titan, proved to the world.
Matthew Gavin Frank explores the origins of the human compulsion to sink to depth, from the diving bells of Aristotle and Alexander the Great to the Confederate H. L. Hunley, which became the first submersible to sink an enemy warship before itself being sunk during the Civil War. The deeper he plunges, however, the more the obsession seems to dovetail with more threatening traits. Following the grisly murder of journalist Kim Wall at the hands of eccentric entrepreneur Peter Madsen aboard his DIY midget submarine, Frank finds himself reckoning with obsession's darkest extremes.
Weaving together elements of true crime, the strange history of the submarine, the mythology of the deep sea, and the physical and mental side effects of sinking to great depth, Frank attempts to get to the bottom of this niche compulsion to chase the extreme in our planet’s bodies of water and in our own bodies. What he comes to discover, and interrogate, are the odd and unexpected overlaps between the unquenchable human desire to descend into deep water, and a penchant for unspeakable violence.
“Frank, an accomplished author of narrative nonfiction, uses his terror as inspiration for this exploration of personal submersibles. . . . Frank’s painstaking research . . . yields evocative mini-portraits, whatever his subject. . . . The sheer depth of Frank’s skill [means] we can smell the damp wood and tequila in the Alaskan cabin where one Nazi-obsessed submariner builds his vessels. . . . His book . . . conjure[s] so vividly Wall’s character and the tragedy of her death.”
—Peter Sagal, The New York Times Book Review
“Matthew Gavin Frank dives into the subculture of DIY submersible enthusiasts. . . . Frank hopscotches across the globe, from British Columbia to Alaska to Denmark, to interview a colorful cast about their calling. . . . Frank questions his penchant for being ‘obsessed with obsessives,’ but zealots are kind of his thing. . . . It would be spoiling the story to reveal what his [own deep-sea dive] was like — just know that he journeys 2,000 feet under the sea, and lives to write the story.”
—Shelia McClear, The Washington Post
“A fascinating mash of crime narrative, psychological profiling and a peek inside the same misogynistic, all-consuming inventor culture that led to the Titan submersible implosion.”
—Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
“Deft. . . . Captivating. . . . Page-turning. . . . Frank has an eye for the unique. . . . He works hard for his readers . . . immersing them in awe-inspiring levels of context and detail.”
—Dave Shiflett, The Wall Street Journal
“If the title alone doesn’t have you jamming the preorder button, the titillating story of what drives people to sink to the depths in amateur submarines will.”
—Lizz Schumer, People, “People Picks the Best Nonfiction Books of Summer 2025”
“A cut-above true crime tome. . . . Frank’s hybrid work defies genre as masterfully as it confronts the dark allure of the deep. . . . Frank’s language is stunning—lyrical without losing clarity, philosophical without becoming murky. This book reads like deep-sea pressure: it builds slowly and then refuses to let go. . . . Mesmerizing. . . . [A] literary triumph.”
—Shari Stauch, The Post and Courier (Charleston)
"A strange and beautiful journey into the depths—literally—of obsession and intrigue at the edge of the known world."
—Jonathan Meiburg, author of A Most Remarkable Creature
"For as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of the ocean. So begins Matthew Gavin Frank’s thrilling study of an obsession—to sink below the surface, to depths both metaphoric and in fact. Frank travels the world, combs through archives, gathers stories of a world most of us will never witness, even as it is all around us. Full of wild characters and strange histories, by the end we are convinced, in no small part by the beauty of his language, that this is one of the most important stories ever told."
—Nick Flynn, author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire
"Submersed might be the scariest book I’ve ever read: I can feel little bubbles of panic float up in me if I just imagine stepping onto an amateur submarine. But I’ll follow an essayist like Matthew Gavin Frank anywhere, and he’s crafted an exceptional journey into the down deep, beautifully examining 'the nagging drive to embed the body into a balloon-like enclosure and float alongside the fishes.' Reading this book, I felt rearranged at an atomic level. What a gift."
—Kristen Radtke, author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness
“Submersed is a dizzying and riveting descent into obsession, toxic masculinity, and the irresistible desire to reach new depths or tell a good story. Matthew Gavin Frank plunges far beneath the surface to observe the best and worst of humanity. A work of narrative nonfiction that is as astonishing as diaphanous sea creatures. One of the best books I've ever read."
—Michele Filgate, editor of What My Father and I Don't Talk About
"Matthew Gavin Frank is a master storyteller. A poetic true-crime cousin of Truman Capote’s classic In Cold Blood, Submersed navigates the horrific murder of journalist Kim Wall, the eccentric culture of the DIY submersible community, and our human relationship to large bodies of water. Believe me, you won’t be able to put this book down until you arrive at the very last page. It’s stunning, commanding, and haunting all at once."
—S. Kirk Walsh, nationally bestselling author of The Elephant of Belfast
"From the DIY pop-up postindustrial steampunk shipyards of Denmark to misogyny and murder, Matthew Gavin Frank is a furnace of intelligence and curiosity. Plumbing the depths and heights of the sea and the human condition, Submersed is an environmental story about obsession and desire, including Frank’s own, where he becomes embedded in the oceanic kelp of cultural complexities and complicated lives. Radiant, dark, elegant, perceptive, Submersed reveals how external landscapes affect our internal ones."
—Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town
“Scintillating. . . . Frank’s thoughtful approach resists the temptation to revel in lurid details. Instead, he delves into the intriguing history of submarines and how the lack of personal submersible regulation results in catastrophes like the implosion of the Titan submersible. . . . Excellent for book groups, Frank’s unique approach is a distinguished tour de force.”
—Colleen Mondor, Booklist (starred review)
“A well-documented look at the submarine community that combines true crime with science writing and history. It’s a good pick for fans of Erik Larsen, as Frank also intersperses the events of a crime within a subject’s larger context, all in engaging and haunting writing.”
—Maria Ashton-Stebbings, Library Journal
“A sharp researcher and stylish writer who’s ‘obsessed with obsessives,’ Frank sets aside his lifelong fear of the ocean in this excellent book to plumb the peculiar depths of the DIY sub community. . . . Frank is witty and incisive . . . and he draws wonderful connections throughout. . . . A fascinating voyage among the hidden tides shaping a social niche.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Frank’s] years of research and reporting are distilled into engaging anecdotes that have the flow of lyrical prose.”
—Anna Ridilla, Gasparilla Magazine
“[An] aquatic escape. . . . Frank is afraid of the ocean, but that doesn’t stop him from diving into the water to learn about the murky world of DIY submarines.”
—John McMurtrie, Kirkus Reviews, “4 Nonfiction Books to Transport You This Summer”
1
If Denmark were a human body, the island of Refshaleøen would be the appendix. It dangles into the Øresund Strait as if some vestigial appendage, subordinate to the larger island of Amager—to which it is presently annexed. On maps, the island appears a little obscene and expendable. Its streets front vast and empty warehouses, factories. The cold sea air has crept into these buildings’ bricks and blocks and beams, compelled them to buckle and bloat. They resemble the petrified remains of giant sea creatures—their beached mythological rib cages frozen in mid-heave.
Many in Copenhagen still refer to the island as “a place to be transformed” from its long-ingrained status as crumbling defunct shipyard to (according to the island’s town council) “a vibrant new destination.” To that end, on the cold grounds of windowless slate-gray buildings that once held ship guts, fetid ropes, and rusting propellers, artists now paint and sculpt. Inspired perhaps by the warehouses’ gaping spaces, their work is oftentimes larger than life and can’t fit through the doors. This work is either imprisoned in the space in which it was created or must be dismantled into its parts. Eccentric engineers joint disparate found components—outriggers, hulls, shards of glass, conveyor belt ramps, oil cans, toilet seats, accordion bellows, and mannequin heads—into unholy machines that clank and whir, beautifully without purpose. Here, amid the decaying factories, there are now festivals—the Copenhell heavy metal extravaganza with its Hades stage; the Copenhagen Distortion Celebration of Nightlife with its “Anything Goes” credo sponsored by Adidas and Red Bull; and the Scandinavia Reggae Festival, “presenting artists from the Scandinavian reggae scene” such as Svenska Akademien, Fastpoholmen, and Spöket.
Many locals who lived through the oil crisis of 1973, which resulted in a global shipbuilding catastrophe, struggle to absorb this new narrative, this quick and drastic recasting of Refshaleøen’s identity. They remember too well the oil embargo that spawned a price increase of nearly 400 percent in Europe. They remember how the shipyards in China, Japan, and South Korea capitalized on the severity with which the crisis hit Europe via a multifaceted plan involving wage cuts, state subsidies, streamlined production plants, and a keen price dumping agenda. Almost overnight, the European shipbuilding market share dropped from 41 percent to 18 percent, as the Asian market share jumped from 46 percent to 70 percent. They remember how, when Refshaleøen’s Burmeister & Wain shipyard went bankrupt and closed its doors, that meant over eight thousand layoffs.
Those who once worked in the shipyard’s many divisions—pipe production, design, engineering, carpentry, scaffolding, electronics, sandblasting, iron, and steel—were, according to studies, simply “absorbed,” or “dissolved,” meaning they were never traced, which is not the same thing as disappearing. All those spaces, which once held the chorus and noise of eight thousand people and their tools, their banging, their schematics, their hulls, and their sparks, every conversation shared, every confession of joy and tragedy, plans made and failed plans, suddenly were silent, abandoned, a few broken beams left behind, a few handfuls of rusty nails. The warehouses became lost colonies, and the wind whistled through them.
•
A tree falls in the woods. A lightbulb inexplicably bursts in an empty warehouse. Ants the size of pinkies rove among the glass. Five kilometers away, at the central station, freight and passenger trains whine and rumble, cars couple and detach; wooden sleepers rattle, concrete sleepers vibrate, loads of coal topple and loads of sugar beets roll. The shells of the cars are uniformly damp and gleaming, and will dry and dull only after leaving Copenhagen, chugging along the rails on their way to some other sector.
The winds off the North and Baltic Seas meet in the middle of the Øresund Strait, and, even in the summertime, crust Refshaleøen with sea spray and chill. In the winter, the place is ice-hardened and dark, squeaky with cold. The sun sets before 3:00 p.m., and the eastern currents, carried to the island’s shores by the Siberian High, can cause one to gasp. The ants go deep underground. It’s too cold for the local teenagers to spray-paint their names and the names of Norse gods on the sides of the warehouses with ungloved hands. In their mittens, they fumble with the cans. Their faces are masked in the fog of their own exhalations. Half of their paint streams freeze in the air before reaching the warehouse flanks. Some of the frozen red mist spatters their boot-tops. Still, shivering, they manage to write their names amid the other graffiti—the lightning bolts and boobs, the hearts and the swastikas.
During these winter months, many locals swear by phototherapy devices—artificial light visors, or golden-lensed sunglasses to lend their world the illusion of brightness—to combat seasonal affective disorder. All this cold goes golden. All this ice, richly piss-colored. Refshaleøen and its shipyards and shop fronts and residents and sea become uniformly jaundiced. Such measures, though, often fail, and insufficiently mitigate the symptoms associated with living here during the winter—feelings of despair, hopelessness, dread, and anxiety, low energy, insomnia, apathy, and an almost unbearable obsession with death. The city council urges the inhabitants to lock up their firearms and put the keys in difficult-to-reach places, so they may have to think twice and exert sufficient effort before turning said firearms on their loved ones, or on themselves.
•
The Øresund Strait, with its maximum depth of 131 feet, conceals the invasive and omnivorous pacu fish that proliferate in its waters, and that are “fully capable”—according to the University of Copenhagen’s cautionary article “Danish Swimmers Escape Waters Fearing Killer Fish”—“of severing fishing lines and even fingers.” On their bellies are serrated keels. The pacu’s teeth, disarmingly, look exactly like those of a human. They often have a slight overbite. With these teeth, they have chewed off the faces of other fish, have eviscerated juvenile crocodiles, have left scars on human shoulders, necks, and rib cages, scars that are often mistaken for human bite marks; scars that some joke are the result of overzealous former lovers. Scars that, especially in the winter months, still redden and itch. Pacu corpses sometimes wash up onto the shores of Refshaleøen, and children dare each other to open the fishes’ mouths and not scream when they behold those humanoid teeth.
The pacu is endemic to the waters of South America and shouldn’t be here in Denmark. How it got here remains a mystery, or a miracle (though few here would call the pacu’s presence miraculous). Was it deliberately loosed into these waters by some traveling prankster? Was it a hardy escapee from a local’s exotic aquarium? Did it slip through some rip in the space-time continuum, a phantasmal hopper amid biomes? Is its presence an anomaly or abomination, or both? Either way, the local wildlife authorities advise those who unexpectedly catch a pacu to immediately “cut the head off the fish and dispose of [it] as garbage.” An abomination is a miracle that bites.
These waters have seen their fair share of so-called abominations. In 1550, the fabled sea monk washed up onto the shore of Refshaleøen and was classified as a monster whose presence signified that the island was cursed by the gods. According to the marine ecologist and author William M. Johnson, stories of the sea monk “were perpetuated with viral-like efficiency,” and the legendary beast soon inflamed the fears of the European mariners of the era, some of whom claimed to have spotted the creature from the decks of their ships. It was described as a ghoul with “a human head and face, resembling in appearance the men with shorn heads, whom we call monks because of their solitary life; but the appearance of its lower parts, bearing a coating of scales, barely indicated the torn and severed limbs and joints of the human body.” Naturalists today remain at a loss as to this creature’s true identity. Was it a giant squid? A seal? A walrus? The legendary basilisk that could kill a human with a sideways glance? A magical Jenny Haniver—a confounding man-made sculpture fashioned from the dried and conjoined carcasses of a skate, ray, guitarfish, and/or angel shark, sewn together and manipulated to approximate an evil creature of myth—a dragon or demon or devil? The Jenny Haniver was said to possess terrible magical powers. Who made it? What was to be the nature of the hex?
On the quay, preparing to defrost, are frozen spit, frozen tears, frozen blood. The waters remain somber, and one may worry about the things they continue to dislodge. In 1983: the ancient ax blades of a sunken Mesolithic settlement dating from 6400 BC. On February 29, 2016: a dead puffin slumped over the fluke of a dead fin whale. On Monday, August 21, 2017, three months after the Copenhagen Distortion Celebration (“Scandinavia’s wildest street party”), two months after the Copenhell heavy metal festival, and four days before the Scandinavia Reggae Festival: a woman’s headless, limbless body.
2
If we’re to believe Dr. Ernest Campbell, surgeon and specialist in “diving medicine,” people who are obsessed with sinking to depth in large bodies of water “have different chemistries and personalities” than those of us who are not similarly obsessed. “Because of the effects of various gases under pressure . . . [they] respond differently to abnormal physiological states and changes in their environment.” Our liquid and solid worlds, our lives at depth and our surface lives, can become confused. Our pressures are in flux, too much gas or too little gas affecting the ways in which we see and feel our worlds.
What makes a diver more unstable: The descent or the return? The dream itself, or the cruel sharpness of the world after waking? No matter: either way, the water, at depth, can ruin a person for the surface. When diving to a depth of one hundred feet, for instance, the body endures four times the pressure it’s used to, and our organs begin to writhe, our lungs wrung as if sponges. We struggle for air. Still, we can’t rise too fast, or the pressure will paralyze us, swell our brains. See all that light up there, convulsing like an amoeba? Hear all that noise about to unmute itself, bully our ears? That’s madness.
•
Refshaleøen’s shipping containers make a colorful labyrinth, each outcompeting the other in the race toward decay. Stacked, they form kaleidoscopic walls of turquoise, orange, yellow, and cream, their flanks festooned with sunbursts of rust. Immersed in their maze, crunching the gravel and broken glass, the smell of the ocean remains so strong it stings the nostrils, waters the eyes. The air here—and everything it touches—stinks of salt and motor oil and viscera. It reddens the throat. Beyond the containers, is that a forklift backing up or a seagull screaming? If one is to successfully emerge from these shipping container lanes, one must follow the wailing sound.
It’s arresting, stepping out into the expansive old shipyard. The defunct smokestacks in the distance are taller and skinnier than the average smokestack, white with black tips, giant noirish cigarettes abandoned unsmoked. They hover like sentries over the post-industrial establishments, wreckage repurposed into hot spots made of glass and steel and thrumming with chill-out electronica. Here, diners can eat dishes called “impressions” while sitting on their hands and wearing 3-D glasses. There, hedonists can don sensory deprivation helmets while immersing themselves in private Jacuzzis called “pots.” When the steam and the deprivation become too much, one can pop off the helmet with the aid of the “ejector button” and emerge into vaporous Refshaleøen, to trance music and a nice cool bottle of sparkling rosé. One can don army fatigues in the Paintball Arena, housed in a converted ship storage warehouse, wherein “adrenaline junkies” can “let their inner sniper loose” and opt to use only red paint, which looks “just like real blood!” Once, Europe’s largest vessels were built in this place.
Many of these football-field-size warehouses have been converted into specialty schools, offering classes in gourmet cooking and surfing, adult education and vehicle repair, pole dancing and psychotherapy. Students whisk and wax, read and screw, spin and analyze beneath sixty-foot ceilings, swaying fluorescents, exposed metal beams, the permanently closed inner doors of the four-story garages. Their voices echo in all that space. They return to their harborside modular homes with shared bathrooms in a “cost-worthy co-living village,” clean-lined boxes of steel and glass nestled together to form narrow alleyways from which one can see only the tops of the nearby masts rising over the upper apartments. The “village” publishes its own journal, espousing the ethics of “living small” and the “science of co-eating” in which residents aspire to commune with the practices of “the Roman Army.” The waiting list for an apartment is yearslong, but applications are always open.