Review by thekeeperofkeys - A Haunting in the Arctic

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thekeeperofkeys 's review for:

A Haunting in the Arctic by C.J. Cooke

dark sad slow-paced

This book was not at all what I was expecting… in a bad way. It switched between two timelines: one with constant - and i do mean constant - sexual assault, and one with an unimaginably frequent mentions of parkour.

Also, multiple weird comments about Inuit women that were incredibly misogynistic for a supposed “feminist horror” author. There are multiple lines about Inuit women wanting to be impregnated by the white sailors, and their only purpose in the story is to be sexual conquests for the men. Deeply unpleasant stuff.

Spoilers below.

The “female rage” revenge plot entailed tormenting and killing completely innocent people who had nothing to do with the (again I can’t stress enough) CONSTANT rape, but NONE of the men who had done the harm to her in the first place. The twist was easily predicted because the two characters, past and present, were named Nicky and Dominique, which gave it away from page one. And the final message of it all was that your trauma and abuse create a purgatory labyrinth that traps unsuspecting victims, and to free them and do the right thing you have to accept you shouldn’t have wanted revenge to begin with. And no I’m not kidding.

The premise of this was honestly very cool, but I genuinely could not understand how it was allowed to play out the way it did without someone involved in the publishing asking themselves what the hell they were trying to accomplish here. This book pissed me off so bad I genuinely want to leave a note in my library copy to warn others.

Content Warnings