Striker is a Black film scout on a luxury Antarctic cruise, photographing locations for a big-budget movie about Shackleton, and she’s the only Black passenger aboard among tech money and blended families she watches with a very dry eye. Then a kayaking excursion goes wrong and a group of them is stranded on an island on the Peninsula, where the cold starts stripping everybody down to what they actually are. Barry wrote it without a single chapter break, and the narrator’s deepest fear — losing her mind — makes everything she reports suspect. Literary horror, and it earns the label.
The Unveiling