#and 'weird fucked up sff/horror' is my jam and that's what they pub

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: ALWAYS NORTH by Vicki Jarrett.

To me, the scariest place on our entire planet is the Arctic, partially because the scariest thing on our entire planet are polar bears, which have been stalking my nightmares since middle school. So, of course, when I saw a fucked-up polar bear on the cover of a weird and fucked up maybe mystery maybe thriller definitely apocalyptic sci-fi adjacent book that takes place in the Arctic, I thought, "Oh yeah I should definitely start reading that at nighttime IMMEDIATELY while winter still nibbles on the edges of the weather, this is foolproof."

Reader: I am the Fool™.

I'm 80 pages in, and so far we've got weird inexplicable shit going on that we're trying to ignore, and we've been warned about bears SO Many Times All Over The Place (yikes), and we're now being stalked by a polar bear who has a History with the captain (borderline Moby Dick but make it a vicious land-capable predator), and time is fake because it's Always Daylight and we are doing Science on a Boat but make it Evil Capitalism also, and there's some neat textual framework going on with chapter headers, and I'm excited to see where this all goes!!