The Unveiling: A Novel

The Unveiling is a piece of literary horror set in Antarctica, where a small group of mostly very wealthy people have traveled on an all-the-bells-and-whistles cruise. We join the cast shortly before they begin a guided kayak stop-off on a small island that is a major nesting/nursery site for penguins. As the group begins its return to the main vessel, disaster strikes and the vacationers find themselves stranded without their guide and with no idea where they are in relation to the main vessel. Thus begins a variation on the watch-the-characters-civilized-veneer-give-way-to-the-worst-aspects-of-their-true-selves trope.

We experience this disaster from the perspective of Striker, a Black film scout looking for possible shooting locations show more for a movie about the failed Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton. Almost everyone else on the cruise is white, so Striker finds herself in the all-too-familiar situation of being a visible outsider. Nonetheless, when the vacationers are stranded, Striker is the person who comes closest to serving as a leader of the bickering group. But Striker has a history of, maybe seizures is the best word, during which she has vivid experiences that she can't be sure are real. Now she finds herself interacting not only with the other members of her group, but also (maybe?) with members of a much earlier and fatal expedition that ended on the island where Striker's group is stranded. At the same time, Striker finds herself turning over unclear, unsettling memories from her childhood.

Watching Striker navigate the different states she finds herself in and seeing the ways other group members are shedding their usual selves makes for interesting reading that becomes increasingly gripping as the story progresses.

The intersection of horror with the ordinary—to the extent that being stranded in Antarctica can be considered ordinary—that drives this novel forward is powerful, raising question after question and making The Unveiling a very difficult book to put down.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. show less

Striker is on a small, very expensive cruise to Antarctica to scout for film locations for biopic about Earnest Shackleton. She doesn't like her fellow passengers, whom she prefers to label with nicknames, and she avoids them as much as she can, from the creepy kid of the divorced gay guys, here with their new partners, to the elderly billionaire and his younger wife. But on a kayak outing to an island, something odd happens and Striker returns to herself to find herself alone in her kayak surrounded only by water. Eventually, she and the surviving members of the outing end up on a desolate volcanic island where the shelter was once inhabited by desperate, shipwrecked men. Striker has visions of what happened in that small cabin, and show more she's not sure that she can trust any of her fellow survivors. Then things get weirder.

This is horror and Striker may be an unreliable narrator. Even if everything she says is true, she's also taking medication usually prescribed for a mental illness and some other person takes over her body in stressful situations and she has no memory of what happened, although she is the one to deal with the repercussions. The idea of a story told from the point of view of someone with multiple personalities is very interesting, but in a horror story, one that depends on rising tension, having the narrator and the character through whom we are witnessing the story of these people stuck on an isolated island with a gruesome history, and missing all of the most dramatic moments is anti-climatic. And when Striker remained around to witness the horror and to discover what happened previously, the story would cut away to talk about Striker's childhood. The childhood parts were well-done and important, but they took away any remaining tension as to the horror unfolding. And with so many plots going, none was given the space it needed to breathe. Quan Barry is an excellent writer with so many great ideas that I'll happily pick up her next book, but this one, despite all the elements being good, worked less well as a whole than it should have. show less

The Unveiling is a wonderfully weird meditation on trauma, told from the perspective of a very unreliable narrator. I started with the audiobook, and although Janina Edwards's performance is excellent, I had to switch to the ebook because I couldn't keep track of what was going on. Not that reading it with my eyes made it easy to follow, just less difficult. The ending falls a little flat, but the setting/atmosphere is incredible.

I have read MANY of the Antarctica spooky books that have been released over the years: (Edgar Allan Poe's 'Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym', Jules Verne's 'Antarctic Mystery', Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness', and Mat Johnson's 'Pym') so I was thrilled to see a writer that I admire was continuing the theme. I'm a fan of Barry's 'We Ride Upon Sticks' and it looks like her novels are always bound to be wildly different from each other from here on out. One interesting aspect of this book tackling racism, is that it is post-2020 in which the main character Striker is annoyed with white people who are trying to go overboard in trying to be an ally, or that before 2020 it was easier for her to read white people, before they became show more more inscrutable. A different layer to racism, other than the blatant. The sadness continues. But this was only briefly mentioned, so it is hard to attribute this as a theme of the book. I can admire the point of the VEIL, but I'm not sure if this book succeeded in what it intended to do, if I am going by the importance of the title. The cover is perfect. The plot is ALLL over the place. But maybe this is how horror usually is. I don't read a ton of horror. The unreliableness of Striker also creates mayhem. Everything here contributes mayhem, really. The environment, people, memory... The scattered mystery of it all reminds me of so many things I love and that linger, if only because you are left wondering WTH: Twin Peaks, VanderMeer's Area X, the TV show Lost. I can appreciate that the uncanny starts on PAGE ONE and goes to the last page. There is no calm before the storm in this one. Some would say this is not how you should write a novel. I say: not all the time... sometimes a writing formula is boring.This book would probably definitely be most fitting for those Lost fans. Lost was also chaos at the jump. Mostly, this book is great for a lot of spooky imagery. The mystery of what was going on sure had me turning the pages. Barry has also published many poetry collections and I DON'T think part of the reason this is so mysterious is that the writing is "overly poetic" (which I don't think it was) -- I think the mystery is mostly from plot and the main character's perspective. A horror novel from a poet? Fun. Overall, another good one to add to the stack of Antarctic weird books. (It is WAYYY better than Poe's book anyway.) Sometimes I like a puzzly unreliable narrator type of book. 'Someone Like Us' by Dinaw Mengestu comes to mind.
*Book #168/394 I have read of the shortlisted Morning News Tournament of Books show less

The protagonist is so unlikeable that I do not wish to spend any more time with her. It does not help that for some inexplicable, "artistic" reason several pages are redacted with black bars, allowing only certain words or phrases to appear. I assume the author had a good reason for doing this but it completely escapes me and I can't see how this helps in the telling of the story.