All the White Spaces
Books | Fiction / Horror
3.5
Ally Wilkes
A Bram Stoker Award nominee “Some of the best survival horror we’ve read in years, with a uniquely menacing adversary at its heart.” —Vulture, The Best Horror Novels of 2022 “Epic.” —Esquire, The 22 Best Horror Books of 2022 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.
Horror
AD
Buy now:
More Details:
Author
Ally Wilkes
Pages
368
Publisher
Simon and Schuster
Published Date
2022-03-29
ISBN
1982182725 9781982182724
Community ReviewsSee all
"I so wanted to love this. I really liked the premise - the combination of interwar period, polar exploration, queer self-assertion, and confronting trauma felt like it would be right up my alley. But the plot felt like a slog — partly because the character’s relationships were only sketched out, rather than explored in enough depth to make the tensions and connections strike home (which means the sense of alienation and anxiety you’re meant to feel, and any sense of sympathy for the characters, always remained a little artificial and somewhat forced) — partly because the main character is so unlikable. I get that he’s seventeen, and in many ways very naive — and the author did give a good sense of the anxieties and frustrations he experiences in relation to his identity — but it’s hard to remain sympathetic when his naïveté, combined with entitlement and self-centeredness, keeps leading him to make terrible choices which others have to suffer the consequences of. By the point he finally started to realise the consequences of his actions, I’d entirely lost patience with him. "
rungemaille
"Excellent writing and tense psychological and physical situations. I enjoyed the exploration of a trans character in a time where this was not fully understood (early 20th century). "
Anne Marie Barrios
