The Unveiling by Quan Barry (Grove Press) ~Janet Brown

I couldn’t fall asleep last night and I blame Quan Barry.

Long before climate change became a global preoccupation, Antarctica fascinated me. A place colder and less populated than my part of the world? As an Alaskan child, I knew what winter was. Learning about a continent where the landscape was composed of ice, all year round, was horrifying and compelling.

Now I’m much older and that horror has taken on more resonance as Antarctica melts. Photographs of icebergs, only partially visible, looming in the seas of the Southern Ocean hold threats and mysteries that are impossible to ignore. 

It’s one of those photographs that make The Unveiling irresistible and for an entire day I failed to resist, even though horror novels aren’t my genre of choice. It hooked me from its first page, where Striker, a Black location scout for a film company, is in the middle of Antarctica’s Drake Passage, seated in a zodiac, in the company of wealthy white adventure tourists. When an unnamed disaster hits, she and a handful of other passengers manage to find shelter in a little cabin built as a shelter for past explorers. Suddenly the novel becomes a version of Lord of the Flies, with a wildly diverse cast of characters, one of whom is a murderer.

He isn’t the most bloodcurdling aspect of the book (nor is it the graphically described effects of advanced scurvy on scars from cosmetic surgery.) That’s reserved for Striker, who’s beset with auditory hallucinations and extended periods of blackouts, her medication that prevents this from happening still aboard the vanished cruise ship. She’s a woman haunted by her childhood, when she and her sister were adopted as a pair by a white couple in a small New England town. She grew up with a visceral understanding of Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece of horror, The Lottery, and Jackson’s lesser known account of blossoming madness, Hangsaman. She’s now haunted by memories of her dead sister and a group of weird specters who come to her without warning in the Antarctic ice.

As a perpetual outsider, Striker is a pitiless observer and what she sees in the other passengers is innate savagery and racism glossed over by education and social class. In the frozen darkness, surrounded by murderous skua and staying alive by eating scavenged penguin eggs, they debate slavery, affirmative action, critical race theory, while ignoring the central issue. They’re alone and nobody is coming to their rescue. 

“We are dead,” a Russian crewmember, a veteran of the war in Ukraine who carries his own ghosts, tells Striker, “We just need to believe we are.”

The Unveiling is an allegory, which makes it true horror. There are no saviors, there is no triumph in its ending. We are all in that cabin.

Quan Barry is a poet, an academic, as well as a novelist. Her poetry is scathing, not lyrical, dipping deep into her personal history without being personal. Barry was born in Saigon, two years before it became Ho Chi Minh City. Brought to the U.S. by Operation Babylift, she was adopted by a New England couple and grew up in a town that was once known as Salem Village, home of the Witch Trials. Her history is steeped in horror on every side and her writing explores all of these facets.

“Half-Black, half-Vietnamese, I’m transracially adopted—I just don’t believe in that idea that you have to stay in your lane,” and nobody is as skillful as she when it comes to forcing us out of ours.