Before I get into it, I will say that my favourite part of this book was how information was slowly revealed, so I recommend going into this without knowing much about it. If you’re in the mood for a claustrophobic gothic novel set on a small, frozen-over island, pick this one up and skip over my description. But if you need more information, here it is.
We start with an author’s note about the winter of 1962 in the United Kingdom, aka The Big Freeze. It was the coldest winter in a century, with the snow beginning on Christmas Eve and temperatures not rising until March. Then, the story begins in October of 1962, which gives us a ticking countdown clock.
Marta Khoury is a marine archaeologist, which is a career made even more impressive by the fact that she’s a Syrian woman in the 1960s. She’s been sent to Cairnroch, a remote Scottish island, to recover a body and treasures from a Victorian shipwreck that’s been recently recovered. The body belongs to an explorer practically worshipped on Cairnroch: a local celebrity. They’re confident that setting up a museum around his body and belongings will save the island by bringing tourism back.
This is an important job for Marta, too. She needs to prove herself or risk being fired—and there’s nowhere else she could go with her very specific skills. Her boss, inconveniently, is her husband, at least until the divorce is finalized. He and Marta both blame her for what happened to his friend Lewis, and he’s looking for a reason to recommend she no longer be employed by the museum.
In the first chapter, Marta does the initial dive to scope out the shipwreck, taking photos as she goes. She finds the explorer’s body and a surprising amount of his belongings: a coin, his partially readable captain’s log, his snow glasses—a very promising start to a museum exhibit. But she also sees something else: a shadowy figure, crouching in the corner.
I love a horror novel that gets straight to the premise. I expected this to be an underwater horror story, but it’s really a gothic about this island. When Marta resurfaces, shaken, she begins to make friends with the bartender, Elsie—and then an unexpected romance. Elsie is the exception, though: this small island is extremely religious and insular; they aren’t welcoming to strangers. In fact, when the siren goes off (this is the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis), Marta is not allowed inside the bomb shelter.
When Marta starts the second dive, to recover the skeleton, she soon realizes the ship has been looted. All those artifacts she took pictures of and promised to her client are gone. Now, she has to track down who stole them or lose her job. Meanwhile, strange things keep happening: a scratching sound encircling the outside of the church she’s sitting in, a man’s handprint on the outside of her window, that shadowy figure out of the corner of her eye. Is it Lewis, haunting her? The captain? Or is she imagining it?
As the freeze sets in, Marta is trapped on this claustrophobic island. The rundown hotel she’s staying at is drafty, and they stuff newspapers around the windows and close off rooms to try to stay warm, huddling around a coal fire. The longer the cold weather continues, the more strange behavior people show, and Marta isn’t the only one who confesses to seeing strange things. Is it the haunting? A curse? Or just the cold getting to them?
I love this gothic novel. It’s so atmospheric, and the pacing of little reveals is perfect. It isn’t so much that there are shocking twists, but we’re always getting new pieces of information that change things. The description of the weather was so convincing that I found myself grabbing a blanket while reading this. I highly recommend this for fans of gothic novels.
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