a photo of the book cover of the unveiling which is a dramatic rendering of an iceberg both above and below the water line.
Vietnam-born and Madison-based author, poet and playwright Quan Barry traveled to Mongolia in 2008, but waited until 2022 to publish a novel set in that country (When I’m Gone, Look For Me in the East). So it makes sense that even though Barry spent time in Antarctica in 2004, The Unveiling — a novel inspired by those travels — didn’t appear until now.
“Oftentimes when I travel to places that are a little off the beaten path, I don’t go with any agenda. I have no ideas about how they might appear in my work,” says Barry, who adds she’s been fortunate enough to visit all seven continents. “At the time I went to Antarctica, I had never written any fiction, really. I was primarily a poet.”
Since 2015, though, the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at UW-Madison has written four novels, including The Unveiling. The highly anticipated, genre-bending work of social satire and literary horror arrives in bookstores Oct. 14 — the same day Barry will appear at Madison’s Central Library as part of the Wisconsin Book Festival‘s year-round programming.
Set at the bottom of the earth, The Unveiling follows Striker, a Black film scout on a mission to photograph potential locations for a big-budget movie about Ernest Shackleton’s doomed Antarctica expedition in the mid-1910s. She’s joined by a gaggle of insanely wealthy (and mostly white) tourists seeking adventure and absolution. A freak kayaking incident in the Southern Ocean maroons Striker and her fellow travelers on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula, where the real and supernatural worlds quickly collide.
“Around 2016 or 2017 — I don’t remember exactly — I began thinking about writing sort of a modern version of [William Golding’s] Lord of the Flies, with adults stuck in Antarctica. But I didn’t do anything about it,” Barry recalls. “Then 2020 happened — the murder of George Floyd, social unrest — and I realized that the book I was envisioning could really have a lot of social justice overtones and talk about the idea of race and how we as Americans take our prejudices and our thoughts about race with us wherever we go.”
Part ghost story, part survivor’s tale, The Unveiling is both humorous and unsettling as hell. As a reviewer for the Chicago Tribune raved, it “should be a Hulu series before you finish reading this sentence.”
At the end of the book, in the “References” section, Barry cites Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, Stephen King’s The Shining, and the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne along with Lord of the Flies.
“Except for The Shining, I don’t think those other books are considered to be horror books, even though they are,” Barry says. “When Lord of the Files is taught in schools, it’s as a sort of social commentary about the darkness of man. Those books really helped inform my sense of how to write this particular kind of horror.”
This particular kind of horror simmers and seethes, as dread outlasts fear. Though characters die, their deaths aren’t gratuitous, and readers sense Barry could have taken scenes in more gruesome directions.
“Some of my friends have actually told me, point blank, they’re not going to read this book because it’s a horror book. And I’m like, you know, people have died in almost all of my books!” she laughs, noting she added funny bits to the narrative, too. “I have to admit, if I knew how to really scare people, man, I would have done it.”
Perhaps because of Barry’s poetry pedigree, The Unveiling also relies on a variety of narrative devices — redacted text, passages in brackets, brief bursts of italics — that serve purposes open to interpretation.
“Ultimately, I see the book as a mirror,” Barry says. “That’s kind of the whole idea of The Unveiling. Like, what have you unveiled? What is inside you? What is your story? It’s a work that asks you to go inside yourself, and what you find there will help you interpret the book.”
