“Some of the best survival horror we’ve read in years, with a uniquely menacing adversary at its heart.” —Vulture Something deadly and mysterious stalks the members of an isolated polar expedition in this haunting and spellbinding historical horror novel, perfect for fans of Dan Simmons’s The Terror and Alma Katsu’s The Hunger. In the wake of the First World War, Jonathan Morgan stows away on an Antarctic expedition, determined to find his rightful place in the world of men. Aboard the expeditionary ship of his hero, the world-famous explorer James “Australis” Randall, Jonathan may live as his true self—and true gender—and have the adventures he has always been denied. But not all is smooth sailing: the war casts its long shadow over them all, and grief, guilt, and mistrust skulk among the explorers. When disaster strikes in Antarctica’s frozen Weddell Sea, the men must take to the land and overwinter somewhere which immediately seems both eerie and wrong; a place not marked on any of their part-drawn maps of the vast white continent. Now completely isolated, Randall’s expedition has no ability to contact the outside world. And no one is coming to rescue them. In the freezing darkness of the Polar night, where the aurora creeps across the sky, something terrible has been waiting to lure them out into its deadly landscape… As the harsh Antarctic winter descends, this supernatural force will prey on their deepest desires and deepest fears to pick them off one by one. It is up to Jonathan to overcome his own ghosts before he and the expedition are utterly destroyed.

Ally Wilkes's horror fictionalization of Antarctic exploration has a lot of good things going for it. The protagonist (who goes by Jonathan) is interesting as a person struggling with their gender limitations and discovering a queer identity by being mistaken for a man and accepted into a ship's crew. The dynamics of that crew -- working under an overconfident and slipping captain and navigating a set of secrets and animosities as the voyage goes wrong -- are quite well rendered and the shifting alliances and conflicts are all believable and compelling. And the story of the polar expedition and how it goes wrong is exciting and move the plot forward smoothly as the ship is wrecked on the ice and the remaining crew camps in an abandoned base. On all those fronts, the book was interesting and fun to read. The problem was that this was a horror novel, and the horror does not work. The idea is that there's a ghost in the ice that tempts the crew to abandon their base and freeze to death by masquerading as people they miss, but it's never really convincing why the crew just can't ignore it and go about their business. The scenes where the ghost attacks aren't scary. They just don't make sense. There's nothing inherently frightening about Jonathan watching a crew member just walking away from a post, and when the characters do finally leave their base to return to their damaged ship, it seems like they do it just by saying no to the ghost when it tempts them. Was it that easy the whole time? If so, why did anyone fall for this? The shame of it is that Wilkey does a quick good job exploring Jonathan's relationship with their own grief at their brothers' deaths and navigating the unrequited romantic interests of their brothers' surviving friend and the arc of Jonathan's acceptance and then tenuous relationship to the crew is compelling. Ultimately, it just would have been better if Wilkey had written a literary novel about a genderqueer coming of age story on a Antarctic voyage rather than muddling the whole thing with a poorly-rendered horror plot.