'William Day should be an acclaimed Arctic explorer. But after a failed expedition, in which his remaining men only survived by eating their dead comrades, he returned in disgrace.
'Thirteen years later, his second-in-command, Jesse Stevens, has gone missing in the same frozen waters. Perhaps this is Day’s chance to restore his tarnished reputation by bringing Stevens—the man who’s haunted his whole life—back home. But when the rescue mission becomes an uncanny journey into his past, Day must face up to the things he’s done.
'Abandonment. Betrayal. Cannibalism.
'Aboard ship, Day must also contend with unwanted passengers: a reporter obsessively digging up the truth about the first expedition, as well as Stevens’s wife, a spirit-medium whose séances both fascinate and frighten. Following a trail of cryptic messages, gaunt bodies, and old bones, their search becomes more and more unnerving, as it becomes clear that the restless dead are never far behind. Something is coming through.'
Ally Wilkes seems to have found something that she's really, really good at writing, and I'm super glad that they're sticking to it. After the absolutely fantastic All The White Spaces, one of the best debut novels I've read, I was happy to learn that they would be staying in the realms of historical, queer, arctic horror stories, and Where the Dead Wait is the perfect companion piece to the first book; though this time it jumps to the other side of the world, and gives you a reason to fear the North Pole, as well as the South.
Where the Dead Wait tells the story of William Day, a young sailor who found himself in a horrific position some thirteen years prior to the main events of the book. Part of a polar expedition, his ship became trapped in the ice, with the provisions running low and the crew becoming sick. When the captain dies, Day is thrust into a doomed command, and tries his best to keep the sick and dying members of the crew alive as they take to the ice. He does whatever it takes to keep himself and his men alive, even doing the unthinkable.
When Day and his men are finally found the truth about their survival becomes a scandal, with stories of cannibalism splashed across the front pages of the papers. Day becomes a pariah. However, years later, when one of the members of his old crew, and the man he secretly loves, Jesse Stevens, has gone missing in the same icy waters in another expedition. Day is given the chance to redeem himself, and save the man he loves, by leading a rescue party north to find the missing group. But this is no normal expedition, his crew is filled with the superstitious survivors of a disaster at sea, and he has to bring along Stevens' wife, a psychic medium, and her personal bodyguard, a native girl named Qila.
As they sail into the cold and desolate north, looking for signs of the missing party more and more strange things begin to happen on the ship, and Day has to questions if the strange visions he's being haunted by might not just be all in his mind, but dark forces from beyond the veil come to destroy him and his crew.
Much like All The White Spaces, I found that Where the Dead Wait became the perfect kind of book for the time of the year I read it. Sitting in the dark of my room, the only illumination the screen of my kindle and a dim lamp, wrapped in a blanket against the cold, whilst fierce wind howled against the side of the house, rattling the windows in their frames. The only thing that was missing were flurries of snow. This book makes for a perfect winter read, one that has you questioning if the chill that just went down your spine was the weather, or what you just read.
And, similarly to her last book, Wilkes doesn't use obvious horror. The book has you questioning what is and isn't real, has you wondering if the characters are going mad, and what kind of dark forces are lurking just out of sight. Much of the book relies on an increasing sense of tension, slowly ramping up the eeriness until you're almost begging for something to happen just to cause a break in the worry that's building inside you. However, unlike the previous book, where that tension never really broke, this time it does. Wilkes throws some truly horrific moments at the readers, and they do so in ways that shock and astonish, moments that leave you wondering if what you read was real, or another dark hallucination in the arctic night.
One of the things that I personally loved about All the White Spaces was the queer representation the book had. The lead character was a young trans man, and it was fantastic to see a lead in a horror story from this demographic. And I know a lot of people were hoping for something similar with this book too, and Wilkes absolutely delivers on that a second time, telling a wonderfully crafted story of hidden gay love, of a man desperately wanting to be with someone society tells him he can't be. There are some wonderful moments in the book that goes deep into Day's head, and shows you how much his love for Stevens has affected him. But, a persons feelings can sometimes hide some painful truths, and our hearts can lie to us, and the more we learn about Stevens the more complex this relationship becomes, leading to some unexpected moments that might be some of the most horrific due to how real it is.
Where the Dead Wait is a hugely atmospheric book, one that's packed full of dark and disturbing scenes that play with both the characters and readers heads. It demands your attention, and juggles a lot of plot threads and characters, creating an intricate and fascinating tapestry (one that you might want to make notes about along the way just to keep up). With Wilkes having explored the two opposing extremes of the globe, terrifying readers of both tales, I can't wait to see what they have in store for us next. Whatever it is, I'll be reading it as soon as I can.
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