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A Novel
by Quan Barry
Book Reviewed by:From the award-winning author of We Ride Upon Sticks and When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East, a genre-bending novel of literary horror set in Antarctica that explores abandonment, guilt, and survival in the shadow of America's racial legacy.
Striker isn't entirely sure she should be on this luxury Antarctic cruise. A Black film scout, her mission is to photograph potential locations for a big-budget movie about Ernest Shackleton's doomed expedition. Along the way, she finds private if cautious amusement in the behavior of both the native wildlife and the group of wealthy, mostly white tourists who have chosen to spend Christmas on the Weddell Sea.
But when a kayaking excursion goes horribly wrong, Striker and a group of survivors become stranded on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula, a desolate setting complete with boiling geothermal vents and vicious birds. Soon the hostile environment will show each survivor their true face, and as the polar ice thaws in the unseasonable warmth, the group's secrets, prejudices, and inner demons will also emerge, including revelations from Striker's past that could irrevocably shatter her world.
With her signature lyricism and humor, Quan Barry offers neither comfort nor closure as she questions the limits of the human bonds that connect us to one another, affirming there are no such things as haunted places, only haunted people. Gripping, lucid, and imaginative, The Unveiling is an astonishing ghost story about the masks we wear and the truths we hide even from ourselves.
Excerpt
The Unveiling
With every second, she could feel herself disappearing. The air smelled brisk like early spring. A faint breeze stirred the water, drops raining off her paddle each time she lifted it. For a dizzying instant, she couldn't even recollect the specifics of her own face. To make it all worse, her sunglasses were gone.
"This can't be happening," she whispered. She had no proof hers wasn't the only human consciousness left on the planet. She recalled a philosophy class she'd taken as an undergrad. The professor admitting that the greatest questions of philosophy still had yet to be solved. Who are we? Is there a god? How do we know who we are without others around to reflect our personhood back at us? In the middle of the talk, she began to panic, her breath growing ragged as the blood pounded in her throat.
What would it feel like to be dead?
In the lecture hall, she could hear someone hyperventilating. She knew the one struggling to breathe was her. Something small ...
Adding to the inherent unease in this isolated setting are the storytelling techniques Barry uses, crafted to maximize the reader's disorientation. Sections of the text appear to be redacted, or are set in angle brackets—readers soon learn that Striker (who confesses that her greatest fear is losing her mind) has a tendency to lose awareness of her surroundings for periods of time, a phenomenon she calls becoming "Dark Striker." While she's stranded on the island, these Dark Striker episodes are accompanied by vivid visions of the past, of a different polar expedition gone horribly awry, devolving into violence and madness. This isn't just a straightforward horror novel, however; the nearly oppressive whiteness of the polar landscape serves as a potent visual metaphor for Striker's feeling of being stranded in a menacing interpersonal environment of alienation and otherness...continued
Full Review
(704 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Quan Barry's literary horror novel The Unveiling follows an Antarctic sightseeing expedition that goes horrifically awry. Here are a handful of other thrillers and horror novels about dream vacations gone very, very wrong—perhaps you'll want to pack one on your next holiday?
The Ruins by Scott Smith
Two young couples set out for an idyllic, low-key getaway in the Mexican jungle—only to realize that something terrifying lurks in the ruins they find there.
The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun (translated by Lizzie Buehler)
On the more literary/satirical end of the spectrum, a corporate whistle-blower at a "disaster tourism" company is sent off to inspect one of the company's destinations, whose residents are ...
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