{ "item_title" : "The Unveiling", "item_author" : [" Quan Barry "], "item_description" : "A novel that's equal parts 'White Lotus' and 'Get Out'--New York TimesFrom the award-winning author of We Ride Upon Sticks and When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East, a genre-bending novel of literary horror set in Antarctica that explores abandonment, guilt, and survival in the shadow of America's racial legacyStriker isn't entirely sure she should be on this luxury Antarctic cruise. A Black film scout, her mission is to photograph potential locations for a big-budget movie about Ernest Shackleton's doomed expedition. Along the way, she finds private if cautious amusement in the behavior of both the native wildlife and the group of wealthy, mostly white tourists who have chosen to spend Christmas on the Weddell Sea.But when a kayaking excursion goes horribly wrong, Striker and a group of survivors become stranded on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula, a desolate setting complete with boiling geothermal vents and vicious birds. Soon the hostile environment will show each survivor their true face, and as the polar ice thaws in the unseasonable warmth, the group's secrets, prejudices, and inner demons will also emerge, including revelations from Striker's past that could irrevocably shatter her world.With her signature lyricism and humor, Quan Barry offers neither comfort nor closure as she questions the limits of the human bonds that connect us to one another, affirming there are no such things as haunted places, only haunted people. Gripping, lucid, and imaginative, The Unveiling is an astonishing ghost story about the masks we wear and the truths we hide even from ourselves.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/80/216/535/0802165354_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "28.00", "online_price" : "28.00", "our_price" : "28.00", "club_price" : "28.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "28.00" } }

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A few chapters into reading Quan Barry’s The Unveiling you might think, “These folks seem disturbingly unfazed by the sight of dead bodies.” Is it because they’re the kind of people who can shell out tens of thousands of dollars for an expedition to Antarctica, and if you have that kind of cash, you become a bit blasé? Indeed, one of them might possess homicidal ideation. At least our protagonist, Striker, suspects so. Striker is the one guest who’s not rich enough to pay for the trip on her own. She’s a scout for a film company that’s thinking of using Antarctica as a location. She’s the only Black person among the group as well, an isolation that’s familiar because Striker and her beloved sister Ama were raised by white adoptive parents in a tony white neighborhood. Striker also suffers from weird, blackout-causing migraines, represented by actual redactions in the text that sometimes go on for pages. On top of this, sometimes when Striker touches an object she can relive its history like a psychic. She calls this part of her Dark Striker. If she doesn’t take her migraine meds, the visions become more frequent, more vivid, more violent. Sometimes, they seem to bleed into reality. The spells terrify Striker, but to the world she displays such confident intelligence and spiky wit that when a deadly mishap strands the tourists, they make her their leader, sort of. Barry’s book feels quite a bit like a mashup of Agatha Christie and H.P. Lovecraft. Here is a bunch of humans who find themselves stuck in a place that’s simply not meant for human beings. Will a rescue ship find them before their stores of century-old pemmican run out and they start eating one another? Is the world beyond Antarctica even still there? Moreover, the castaways hide terrible secrets, including Striker, and the unveiling of these secrets could destroy them. Even the ice itself has ghastly history buried within it. You won’t soon forget the unsettling and compelling work that is The Unveiling.