Where the Dead Wait

Starred review from October 16, 2023
Wilkes follows up 2022’s All the White Spaces with a spectacular tale of cold, cannibalism, and consequences. In 1869, William Day inherits command of a ship exploring Arctic waters after several of its senior officers die of scurvy. When the ship is immobilized by ice, its food stores quickly run out. Day, with the support of second-in-command Jesse Stevens, decides the crew must eat the dead to survive. After the survivors are rescued and Day returns to England, he is vilified as a cannibal and a murderer, and his career appears to be over—until, 13 years later, a ship led by Stevens is lost in the same waters the pair once sailed together. Day is desperate to save Stevens, for whom he secretly harbors romantic feelings, so the British Admiralty reluctantly gives him the resources to mount a search, on two conditions: his expedition will lack official sanction, and he’ll be accompanied by Stevens’s wife, Olive, a noted American spiritualist, and a journalist obsessed with the earlier disaster. Eerie events follow—Olive’s shipboard séances seeking guidance to her husband’s location call up the smell of roasting meat, strange noises below deck convince the crew that something uncanny is on board, and Day begins to see Stevens in increasingly violent apparitions that suggest their long-ago cannibalism may have been born from more than pure necessity. Expertly interweaving the two timelines, Wilkes crafts rich physical and psychological landscapes that deepen her terrifying tale as it barrels toward an unforgettable crescendo. This is a breathtaking achievement.