porge_grewe's reviews
164 reviews

A beautiful, sad, cruel, hopeful depiction of colonisation, resistance, and social change for better and worse. Through her three point of view characters, Le Guin captures ideologies and ideas which create and perpetuate imperialism and mobilises resistance to it, even as she creates and peoples a world and universe with amazing efficiency. It was also good, if very uncomfortable, to find a sci fi story not shying away from, but engaging directly with real-world racism as it elaborated on racism against the constructed people groups in the story. This novella is angry, important, and heartbreaking.

This is a frustrating book. Paver has always described landscape and weather beautifully, and here she puts that skill to use with an equally awe-inspiring and unsettling depiction of the Arctic. Similarly, her skill at characterising animals, especially dogs, appears here in her handling of an entire pack of huskies. The only things which let this ghost story down, in fact, are the plot, characters, narrative voice, and lack of tension.

The story is told almost entirely through the journal entries of a single, abrasive, patronising member of an Arctic expedition, who spends most of his time when he is not complaining about his current situation complaining about his reduced circumstances which led to hi taking the job. Characters like this can be perfect for a horror story as their bitterness reflects and exacerbates the malevolent forces surrounding them and as perhaps they find things to care about and protect, but this character crosses the line for me where they no longer feel real and I truly no longer care whether they live or die, which is fatal for tension.

This is unfortunate, as this story needs all the help it can get for building tension. The structure of the novel, being made up of journal entries, means that the main character's views on the ghostly goings-on flips near-constantly during the story as he calms down or second-guesses himself between entries, so any tension built up in one entry is often thrown away in the next. Occasionally in such a story this sort of alleviation can serve to prolong the ordeal, but here it appears far too much and stops anything from effectively building.

Without sustained tension and without a main character for whose life I much care, the ghost story must then rely on its mystery. Once again, however, the story falls down here. The ghost is what the characters think it is from early on in the story. More details are added, but there is no reversal, no surprise. And what the ghost is is not terribly interesting.

If you want an atmospheric, gruelling stay in Arctic conditions, read Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. If you want an atmospheric stay in the Arctic with some wonderful descriptions of dogs and an insufferable bunkmate, then you could do worse than this. If you want an engaging ghost story, however, I would recommend Chang Yu-Ko's Whisper or the old standby of MR James.

Bizarre, brilliant, hilarious, and desperately sad. Explores similar themes to Convenience Store Woman from a different angle and with an admirable willingness to take ideas and philosophies to their natural conclusions.

Content warnings for

Spoiler

sexual abuse/rape of a child, murder performed by a child, underage sex, emotional trauma/dissociation, incest, and cannibalism (depending on your point of view)

Angry, fun, and deeply cynical - An excellent satire on the frustrations of bureaucracy, the banality of evil, and the economics of tourism.

I can already tell this will become a staple of my reading in the run-up to Halloween. A great, quick read, full of enthusiasm for horror and the supernatural in their various forms which is strong enough to put me in mind of Stephen Graham Jones' brilliant writing. Could have used one or two more judicious edits to bring the prose up to the standard of the ideas and the energy in the book, but I very much enjoyed it and am deeply excited for the writer's future work.

Excellent fairytale - Beautiful descriptions, wonderfully-realised creatures, and a surprisingly hard bite.