Starred review from November 10, 2008
In the prologue to this exceptional supernatural thriller from Masello (Bestiary
), two lovers—Lt. Sinclair Copley of the 17th Lancers and Eleanor Ames, a nurse from Florence Nightingale’s Harley Street hospital in London—fall into ice-strewn seas from a British sloop foundering near Antarctica in 1856. In the present, Seattle writer Michael Wilde, who’s recovering from a personal tragedy, can’t resist the opportunity to go to Antarctica to write a magazine article about the Point Adélie research station. Past and present stories alternate until Michael makes an amazing discovery in a submerged block of ice off the Antarctic coast—two frozen bodies, bound in chains. After Sinclair and Eleanor revive, Masello slowly and subtly reveals how they came to transcend death. The thrills and, most decidedly, the chills mount to a believable, sad and hopeful ending. Fans of John Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”—the basis for the movie The Thing
—will find much to like.
Starred review from February 1, 2009
On assignment at a South Pole scientific research station, travel writer Michael Wilde makes a staggering discovery: a man and a woman, bound together by chains, perfectly preserved in the ice. Although the novel doesnt star Carter Cox, who was featured in Masellos Bestiary (2006)and Vigil (2005), it does have much in common with those supernatural thrillers, especially the mixture of past and present. The author tells two stories at the same time: the story of Michael, plunging back into work to make himself stop grieving over a recent personal tragedy; and the story of Sinclair and Eleanor, soldier and nurse, respectively, who meet in the mid-1850s and are, for reasons that remain a mystery for much of the book, eventually chained together and tossed into the frigid Antarctic waters. The novel has all the trappings of a supernatural thrillera dark secret, a mysterious substance in a bottle, a dead man who wont stay deadbut in its heart its a love story, a tale of devotion and sacrifice and survival against astronomical odds. Stylishly written, with a well-crafted story and a cast of vividly realized characters, the novel could propel the author out of his horror niche and into the mainstream.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)