FINAL BOY

To begin this review, I’d firstly give a huge shout out to the Talking Scared podcast, which does a regular deep-dive into horror books, talking with the authors and going really heavily into the themes and the process. The episode with Ally Wilkes was sensational and convinced me within moments that this was a book that was going to be a perfect fit for me.

The book is set in the Arctic, in Victorian times. William Day was a fairly junior officer on a ship looking for the fabled Open Polar Sea, and when disaster strikes finds himself promoted way beyond his experience and his competence. He leans heavily on his shipmate and bunkmate Stevens. At the outset, what we know is that the expedition degenerated into cannibalism and shame for Day, who is dubbed by the press as “Eat Em Fresh Day” – the implication being that he was a bit quick off the mark rather than it truly being a last resort. Thirteen years later, Day is summoned by the navy to mount a rescue expedition, as Stevens has gone missing in the same waters.

He is in every conceivable way a very bad pick to lead such an expedition. He is haunted by his failures, by his past, by Stevens and by god knows what else.

It’s a sensational book. I loved every single minute of it. The writing is just so crunchy – you can smell the bacon frying in the pan in the ships galley and feel Day try to choke down his nausea at what memories that brings up. You feel the cold get into people’s bones, you hear the ice creak and the wood in the ship protest under the pressure. It conveys the Arctic cold so well I kept wanting to put a warmer sweater on to push on to the next page.

The language is just so rich and evocative, and the characters so well drawn. We are mostly with Day and he is so plagued with doubt and confusing feelings that he simply can’t deal with – he is undoubtedly a weak man – and then we have Stevens who is so sure and so seductive.

The book moves between THEN (the first voyage and how it all went wrong, building up the tension and suspense – we know that cannibalism is coming, but how does one get to that point? How does the situation develop to the point where someone says in effect, there’s something we can do to save our lives? Who says it, and how does everyone react?) and NOW – the story of the rescue mission and Day’s unravelling. We don’t see all that much of Stevens directly but his presence is there on every single page, every waking moment of Day’s life.

Every page has that quality that Raymond Chandler spoke about – of putting a diamond on every page. Here’s a page just at random :-

The doctor doesn’t have to spell it out. Game hasn’t been sighted in weeks, and there’s just a scraping of tea dust, and they’ve eaten all the leather uppers from their boots. Day had particularly dreaded eating his boots, with all its grim connotations.

I utterly adored this book – it crept into my bones. I’d read anything by this author from this point on.

And as soon as you’ve finished it, listen to the Talked Scared podcast episode – you’ll never feel the same about barbecue pringles ever again, and Ally was simultaneously the nicest/most fascinating person alive and also someone you would never ever share a lift with or sit next to on a plane flight over the Andes