The superb, gripping debut novel by Ally Wilkes conjures terror from both the darkness of polar winter and the depthless white of snowscapes.
It isn’t hard to see the attraction: the vast blankness of regions unexplored by Western eyes are a canvas on which any horror can be drawn, and can themselves provoke horror vacui: the terror of the void. From The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Edgar Allen Poe, 1838) to At The Mountains of Madness (HP Lovecraft, 1936), and from the TV drama The Terror (AMC, David Kajganich, 2018), to Michelle Paver’s excellent ghost story, Dark Matter (2010), the icy wastes of the Antarctic and Arctic have been used to – pardon the pun – chilling effect. Of the world’s ’empty spaces’, the polar regions have a long and distinguished place in horror fiction. This review first appeared in Horrified magazine in 2022.
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