#where the dead wait

[aidenwaites]

Anyway. Where the Dead Wait summarized

[swordsonnet]

thank you ally wilkes for writing absolute bangers of queer polar horror books, i owe you my life

[fredoesque]

the thing about day and stevens. i mean ignoring all the other things. is day obviously wants to be stevens's favorite and feels like he never will be. even though unfortunately he pretty much is. but i feel in many ways stevens also wants to be day's favorite and feels like he never will be. even though he CLEARLY is. this on account of his delusional worldview

[tigerballoons]

👻 October books 👻

Going for the spooky vibes this month, which is fun!

🔹 Where the Dead Wait - 2⭐

This improved massively in the second half, which saved the rating. It's a shame because the idea behind the plot is great! I love that you're thinking Day has one motivation and then it turns out it's the opposite. But alas... To get that reveal you have to drag yourself through pages and pages of bewilderment. There's just too much being crammed into this story. Two timelines are fine, but not when they each have a ship, the ships have wonderfully symbolic but TOO SIMILAR names, and also a full set of named crew members. You struggle to remember what's going on even though each section starts with the date. It doesn't help that Day is constantly reliving the past, and that events in the 'now' timeline echo the past timeline. Speaking of Day, he's also constantly hallucinating things and I'm sure it's meant to add to the tension, but actually you just end up not believing anything that happens. It'll turn out to not be real in a page or two. And does, usually. Guessing I won't be picking up Wilkes' other book after all...

🔹 Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World's Ends - 3⭐

As with all anthologies, it's a bit hit and miss. Overall they're pretty mid, but there are a couple that stand out. One is Bride of the Antarctic by Mordred Weir, and after reading it you won't be surprised that that's a pen name. The best is Iqsinaqtutalik Piqtuq: The Haunted Blizzard by modern Inuit writer Aviaq Johnson. Read it and regret living alone, 5*.

🔹 Picnic at Hanging Rock - 4⭐

This was one of my most anticipated books this year, and boy does it live up to it! Mysteriously disappearing Victorians have been a bit of a theme here lately, and these ones are Australian and entirely fictional. A party of schoolgirls are on a day out when a small group of them vanish into thin air... There's lots of emphasis on the natural world, some amazing descriptions and a dreamlike tone. I immediately reread it.

🔹 We Have Always Lived In The Castle - 4⭐

I've never read any Shirley Jackson before so wasn't sure what to expect. Fascinating little novella about isolation and desperation and mental illness. The only character who's having a good time here is the cat.

[amundsenxcook]

sobbing

[sunlaire]

I need to see the William Day memes show me the William Day memes

[thesolarsurfer]

Alright tumblr, I got a book rec for y'all. Where the Dead Wait, by Ally Wilkes. I picked it up from my local library and I feel like it will be a slam dunk with its target audience. The book was published in 2023 and is set in the late 1800s, in that time where every naval power was desperate to find a shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific. So we get to join this sad wet cat of a Brit, William Day, on not one but TWO absolutely fuck-awful miserable trips into the Arctic sea. Pretty significant content warnings for all of the horror that comes with dangerous cold, scurvy, starvation, isolation, and even cannibalism. You too can smile and kick your feet in the air as your newest blorbo suffers the agonies of both starvation and leadership as he assumes command of a doomed mission and desperately tries to save people who think he's about as useful out there as a screen door on a submarine. Now that I've sufficiently buried the lede, I'll address the part that will actually draw y'all in: Jesse Stevens, the Worst Man in the Arctic. He's tall, he's handsome, he's strong, he's confident... he's metaphorically wearing two red flags as a loincloth and biohazard/hazmat stickers as nipple pasties. This man is an egocentric manipulative bastard and our poor blorbo is SO very very down bad for this man. This is premium grade forbidden love, grown-ass-man toxic yaoi on a boat. You want cannibalism as a metaphor for devotion? Got it. You want haunting as a metaphor for obsession? We got heaps of it, HEAPS I tell ya. Is the haunting real or is our protagonist just cracked? He doesn't want to find out because...what if that makes the haunting stop? After all, the object of his desire is still alive out there, so that's not a ghost in the mirror...

If you can stomach the horror then I highly recommend this book. It's fantastic, I adored it, I would chew on the spine if it wouldn't damage the book for others.

[sinfulforrest]

just finished Where The Dead Wait and my god I think it's one of my favourite books that I've read for a good while!!! love me some homoerotic tension-filled cannibal horror a a a a

[aidenwaites]

William Day was 24 when he first ended up as captain of the doomed ship The Reckoning and let me tell you. He should've been at the fucking club

[aliengh0st]

The Terror fans! Keep your eyes peeled come December 5th for this book!

—————————————

An eerie, atmospheric Polar Gothic following a Victorian explorer in search of his lost shipmate and his own redemption—from the author of the “vivid, immersive” (The Guardian) horror novel All the White Spaces.

William Day should be an acclaimed Arctic explorer. But after a failed expedition, in which his remaining men only survived by eating their dead comrades, he returned in disgrace.

Thirteen years later, his second-in-command, Jesse Stevens, has gone missing in the same frozen waters. Perhaps this is Day’s chance to restore his tarnished reputation by bringing Stevens­­—the man who’s haunted his whole life—back home. But when the rescue mission becomes an uncanny journey into his past, Day must face up to the things he’s done.

Abandonment. Betrayal. Cannibalism.

Aboard ship, Day must also contend with unwanted passengers: a reporter obsessively digging up the truth about the first expedition, as well as Stevens’s wife, a spirit-medium whose séances both fascinate and frighten. Following a trail of cryptic messages, gaunt bodies, and old bones, their search becomes more and more unnerving, as it becomes clear that the restless dead are never far behind. Something is coming through.

[explorersaremadeofhope]

So have you heard about the upcoming horror novel Where the Dead Waits that's about a famous arctic explorer, disgraced after his expedition failed and turned to cannibalism, traveling back to the Arctic to rescue a lost crew mate? Because I'm very excited about it and no one in my life gets it. It comes out in December and I'm so excited.

Ohh, it's by the same author who wrote All the White Spaces, I thought it might be! 😄

Welp, this sounds like it would hurt me!! But I gotta appreciate her commitment to just.. taking polar exploration history, filing the serial numbers off, mixing and matching, and adding some horror. They're good narratives, you can't deny that!! I didn't read her first book either but I'm definitely intrigued (especially as I know AtWS has queer themes so I'm 👀 whether this one might too).

Thanks for the rec!! 🙏 I may have to wait for this too, now!

[fredoesque]

reading where the dead wait. cannot wait to find out what's up with peters. i hope he eats someone

[tuungaq]

anyway the hickeytozer and day/stevens parallels make me wanna fuckin KMS. excellent dysfunctional romance (that may or may not have been acted on) that destroyed many many lives. 10/10, five stars, no notes

[skye2]

wish i could say “omg we are so william day and jesse stevens coded” without sounding like a psychopath

[amundsenxcook]

me when i start biting people again

[sunlaire]

And ANOTHER thing, I really liked how the perception of Stevens shifted, the flow of information was 🤌 At the start he's presented as The Sun, the source of light, the meaning to Day's struggle. The warmth in Day's bunk on The Reckoning.

When his mythological Story is told about the officer and lamb, the placement of this story in the narrative was fun. At the time, I thought Stevens was the officer.

And then the layers of horror are peeled back. Stevens was never a gentle warmth but a chaotic fire. And at the end, the reality of the man which holds the most truth is that he's a grinning animal, ready to sell whatever face suits him.

He was the lamb. And then the fox.