The Unveiling
Quan Barry’s latest novel...blends [Mike] White’s penchant for delicious, violent satire of the uber-privileged and [Jordan] Peele’s skill at using humor, psychological collapse and flat-out horror to reveal racism afresh ... A controlled exposure of a deeply unsettling situation that involves a small group of seemingly anodyne people in a strange and isolated setting who eventually turn on one another, viciously ... The Unveiling is an ambitious work of literary horror marked by bold storytelling moves. Barry’s execution is uneven — while being confused about what’s going on is a feature, not a bug, of the story, the cumulative impact of the novel’s redactions, fraught bewilderments and other obscuring effects will wear on even the most sympathetic reader’s patience.
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An unsettling ghost story with elements of social satire, historical fiction and climate fiction, this ambitious book explores themes of guilt, memory and racial identity through an inventive but sometimes bewildering lens ... Barry certainly knows how to evoke disorienting physical and mental states; her vivid descriptions are not for the weak-stomached. She also has a sharp sense of humor ... While Barry’s style is distinctive and compelling, the structure of the novel’s central mystery is frustratingly redundant ... More successfully, Barry draws parallels between the hubris of the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration and that of modern humanity.
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Ambitious ... Rife with sardonic humor and social commentary, Barry’s genre-blending latest keeps readers at a distance, with Striker’s reflections veering into unreliable-narrator territory as her energy wanes. Though the ambiguity might not suit every reader’s taste, fans of literary horror will enjoy this thought-provoking exploration of the limitations of survival.
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