Quan Barry's psychological horror novel opens with a straightforward premise: Striker is a Black film-location scout on an Antarctic cruise that is mostly populated by wealthy white people. She's there for work but also to get away from Christmas and its reminders of her dead sister. The bickering passengers are on a kayak excursion when disaster strikes, leaving them stranded on an icy volcano unsure of what really happened in the accident and to the rest of their group. They discover the remnants of past expeditions and, as the days pass and the group splinters, Striker begins to relive the memories of those who died on the island.
The Unveiling isn't a story of a traditional haunting. Although the island itself remembers the trauma that the members of a previous excursion enacted on it and one another, the novel's primary pulse is one of racial and social tension, as well as Striker's avoidance of her own thoughts. As the edges of reality blur in the endless white, Barry (We Ride Upon Sticks) skillfully layers Striker's unreliability with a mist that shrouds the survivors while their numbers dwindle. The Unveiling is rife with avian harbingers of doom and an ever-increasing number of redacted sections of text as Striker loses her sense of time and place. Barry turns an unflinching and darkly funny gaze on actions and their repercussions in a novel that asks, "How much of our personal narratives are even true?" And moreover, who are humans at their core--particularly when they're fighting for survival at the ends of the Earth? --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer