Do You Know Who You Are? Quan Barry's The Unveiling

“How do we know who we are without others to reflect our personhood back at us?”  Literary author Quan Barry’s new novel The Unveiling is a psychological horror story set on an abandoned Antarctic island, where the surreal unsetting sun and blistering white environment slowly strips the cast of marooned vacationers of their identities.  Past blends with present, time becomes meaningless, and reality becomes as slippery as the ice.  The Unveiling gestures at an unsettling solipsism that is likely to leave its readers feeling much like the characters in the book, lost, confused, scrabbling for something familiar to hold onto.

On the eve of her 40^th birthday, Striker is scouting locations for a film about the famed Antarctic explorer Earnest Shackleton.  The cruise ship, The Yergorov, she’s traveling with is full of eccentric white affluents, and she is the only Black woman.  The story picks up with the tourists boarding their zodiacs for a sightseeing outing led by a hunky tour guide that Striker has been fucking during his off hours. 

For the Yergorov group, the warning signs are posted clearly, but this is a horror novel, and if horror stories resemble real life, it’s in the way we all seem to get chewed up by inertia.  Unsettling details are layered throughout the pre-disaster section of the book.  The Yergorov passenger’s tragedy is foreshadowed by the freak death of an albatross.  A strange little girl talks to a secret rat. While sightseeing, strange rocks with bizarre symbols that affect the narrator psychologically suggest something in line with the cosmic horror genre. On the ice, typically tame wildlife reacts to the travelers with hostility.  The Yergorov outing is soon disrupted by a mysterious accident and everyone who witnessed the fatal encounter has different ideas of what they saw.

Barry holds everything back from the reader.  Whether it’s about Striker’s past as a child and adult, the island’s history, or the lives of the passengers, Barry slowly drips details in pieces.  The novel stays in a close 3^rd person, deliriously jumping from the present moment before flowing into abrupt ghostly visions of what happened to a fated group of 100-year-old maroons, then jumping again to Striker’s childhood, or her single adult life, and her nights drinking with best friend Riley.  Everything in this book is constructed to disorient.  Despite the 3^rd person voice, it almost feels as if the reader is getting everything stream of consciousness, the universe experiencing itself through the life of its lone creation.

We learn that Striker grew up raised by a white Catholic family, subjected to the violence of assimilation. For Striker, whiteness is inescapable, metaphorically illustrated by the surrounding  Antarctic white.  The Yergorov passenger’s tragedy is foreshadowed by the death of an albatross driven to sudden madness after being spotted by a bird watcher.   I couldn’t help but wonder if the bird watcher wasn’t in some way responsible for its madness; much like the white passengers that would soon be stranded, the bird is driven to absolute insanity by the simple act of being seen and would spend its final moments thrashing at its observer.  Striker, it seems, is surrounded by this kind of whiteness that, once seen, reacts chaotically.  Characters like Kevin, the Tech Titan’s Husband, seem to have more to hide the more aware the hero is of them.

The prose is constructed carefully in thick, heavy blocks.  The typical footholds you’d find in most genre novels aren’t here. There are no chapter headings, nothing to anchor your position.  Just 400-something dense pages.  It’s disorienting, and I suspect intentional as it leaves the reader as confused about their place in time as the rest of the Yergorov castaways.  It is always 12:14 pm on Christmas Day here.  Further disorienting, Striker’s reliability as a narrator is never certain.  Early in the book, during one of the first truly shocking moments, the reader is lost in a sea of black lines like a redacted government document.   Through flashbacks, we learn about “Dark Striker,” the version of herself that quietly takes over in stressful encounters.  These blackouts are often frustrating because they cut you out of the action, often dropping you back in the middle of a sentence. 

The castaways camp in an abandoned shack left by previous explorers a century or more prior.  They keep making eerie discoveries, and Striker has disturbing visions of what took place there. One or more of the group may be a murderer, while others are succumbing to madness.

Names play an important role in the novel. Striker goes by at least three different names throughout the course of the book.   There are a lot of characters to keep track of, made somewhat more difficult by the nicknames Striker insists upon giving them.  The Tech Titan, the Baron, and La Grande Damme, Bobbi Sue and Billy Bob, and the three Dads.  The Unveiling is a study of flat and round characters, as Striker is hyper aware of her visibility among the fellow passengers, but without these characters’ interiority, we never know their intent.  Striker has constructed flat character archetypes for them in her mind, giving them nicknames.  It’s great setup that pays off on many occasions where a character delivers something wholly unexpected.  Bobbi Sue’s child, Anders, is a non-binary social justice-obsessed kid with perfect recall who just wants their family to accept them instead of regularly being deadnamed.  Striker respects and seems to like Anders, who doesn’t shy away from awkward, uncomfortable questions, and occasionally takes up all the right causes for potentially unjust reasons.  The group looks to Striker as a leader, and each member exhibits their own unique set of microaggressive behavior, though sometimes Striker isn’t even sure of what she witnessed.  

I found The Unveiling a little more difficult than contemporary horror fare, but it was a rewarding experience.  Having been forced by a 4-month-old to read in small sips rather than large chunks, I may have been more disoriented than typical readers.  This is a book that wants you to dive deep and lock in. Like everything in The Unveiling, the source of the horror struck me as unexpected.  Given the allusions to H.P. Lovecraft, I saw signposts for a deconstruction of his cosmic horror, and in a way that was delivered by using my preconceptions against me.  The Shirley Jackson references definitely pay off.  But this is a novel about tearing down expectations.  At the very heart of it, isn’t it always people who are the monsters? 

The narrator’s desire to understand the intent of others cannot be satisfied; we can never truly know one another, but the existential horror in The Unveiling extends that inward.  Do you know who you are?

---

It's been a while, readers. I apologize for the absence. The last year has been chaos; my family has expanded, and as such, I was busy preparing the house and later finding a new rhythm for my writing passion projects. To be honest, I'm still looking for that rhythm. Predictability seems to evaporate as soon as any sense of stability coalesces. I don't have much time to read or write of late. We've been surviving the last 5 months on no sleep, juggling full time jobs, while our little one battles chronic recurring ear infections. That's true horror. I don't know what the future of this space looks like, but I don't intend to go anywhere, and thank you for your continued support.