I have a confession to make. I will read or watch just about anything set in Antarctica.

As you may know, having read previous posts, I’ve been obsessed with Antarctica since an article I read in the NYT in third grade (and what my Tucson ELC classroom was doing with the NYT is a mystery). I finally got to go on a cruise there a few years ago and I have been plotting how to get back there again ever since.¹

So I was skimming through my eBook shelves, trying to figure out what to write about today I was like, Huh? What’s this book? My App says I read it, probably last year or the year before. Hmmm. I couldn’t remember reading it. So I opened it and started re-reading.

It starts like every other book or movie about Antarctica: a plane is arriving, bringing a doctor (or sometimes she’s a security officer) to one of the Antarctic bases. As the plane crosses the endless white plain, the newcomer looks out and reflects on their unexpected decision to go to Antarctica. It’s dangerous, it gets f*ing freezing cold during their winter (our summer)², it’s dark 24-hours a day for months on end (or light 24-hours a day for months on end), and people who winter over there often go crazy.

Then mysterious sh*t starts to happen. In this case, the doctor that the main character is replacing decides to leave on the plane that brought her in, which – due to weather – is leaving right away. The doctor was supposed to wait, to leave on the last plane out which leaves a couple of weeks later – but he has decided to leave now, for some reason.

The main character gets a tour of the base, with all the typical Antarctic lore: the tiny size of the bedrooms, the fully-stocked infirmary, the kitchen that makes amazing food as long as it has ingredients (it gets a little thin later in the winter season, while you’re waiting for the sun to rise and the first plane of the summer season to arrive), the warnings about holding onto the ropes whenever go outside, how quickly people die in the cold, all the layers you have to put on, the problems with the plumbing, the types of chores that have to done.

You meet the other members of the team: the stiff, formal, suspicious head of the team who seems to be covering up things in an effort to maintain control; the wild guys who smoke a lot of dope; the handsome, friendly guy that the main character almost falls into bed with before she realizes that she has to maintain “objectivity”; a couple of dudes who smoke a lot of dope; token lesbian who never emerges as a complete character³; a young woman who is destined to get pregnant during the winter. And of course, the pricklish guy who is obsessed with the death of a colleague who died accidentally while on his watch.

And then you learn a little about the main character’s mysterious background, her reason for retreating someplace as distant as Antarctica. In this case, a car accident that caused a highly visible scar on her face. Oh, and she is still taking opioid pain medication from the injuries she incurred. Or perhaps she is just addicted. Oh, and someone else died in the accident. And she was circling the drain at the hospital where she worked – possibly because of her drug use – so Antarctica was looking good.

Only now someone is trying to kill her and stalking her colleagues. People break into her room and search her belongings, steal her pain meds (luckily she’s the doctor so she has the keys to the medication cabinets in the infirmary). Somehow the hard-ass boss finds out about her problems back home and blames her for the mysterious events that are going down.

Will she find out in time to save everyone from the murderer? Will it end up being the last person she suspects? Or maybe the person who disappeared, presumed dead, before her arrival will turn out not to be dead? Or perhaps she’s secretly the sister or fiancée of the dead guy (like in, oh what movie was that? The Head? Or was that something else?)? Or maybe he was possessed by the alien that they had found in the spaceship buried for thousands of years beneath the ice?

Who knows?

And to tell you truth, with this book, who cares? If you’ve never read a mystery or watched a TV show or movie set in Antarctica, you can read this and you’ll probably be fine, learning about aspects of living in Antarctica that you never knew⁴, and about the people that authors and screenwriters think live there, and the twin mysteries of whodunnit and what the heck is going on with the main character, what is her secret will keep you reading until the very end, when you will be surprised by the answers.

But if you’ve ever read any other book about Antarctica⁵, do something else. Watch The Thing – the 1982 version, please – or The Head instead.

Or just tune into one of those National Geographic specials about Antarctica. It won’t have the murder or the mystery. But it will grip you all on its own.

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1. I don’t regret much in my life – a time in college that I ignored a girl I had known in high school when I unexpectedly ran into her on a street on the other side of the country, not quitting the job I had loved about a year earlier than I did – but the thing that comes to mind first, if you were to ask me what I regret in life, will be when we were sitting in the lobby of the cruise ship we had just taken to Antarctica and back, waiting to disembark in Tierra del Fuego. One of the other passengers that we had become friendly with leaned over and whispered, “Did you hear? They had a last minute cancellation on the voyage leaving this afternoon. You could go again.” My husband and I exchanged one of those married people glances where you know exactly what the other person is thinking: YES! But then I realized that our suitcases, which had disembarked early that morning while we were still sleeping, were already on their way to Buenos Aires where we were supposed to join them in just a few hours. And our rental boots were already returned to the rental depot. And we had that thing on Monday, that work thing. F*ck it – I will always regret not snapping up those open spaces, racing off the dock and up the hill to one of the tourist shops to buy some underwear – short and long – waterproof pants, turtlenecks, and gloves, rent some boots, and shoot off a quick “sorry, not sorry” email to my boss, and go around for another two weeks. I quit that job later that year anyway, what did I have to lose? ↩︎
2. When I was there, in January, it was warmer in Antarctica than it was back in NYC. On one of the last days, we were sitting on the deck, jackets off, basking in the sun and eating lunch, watching the penguins play about on the icebergs nearby. Meanwhile it was crazy cold back in NYC, they were getting a freak snow storm, and the polar vortex was very active. New York City is often very cold in the winter, much colder, people from Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado, and Wisconsin have told me, than places we often assume are crazy cold in the winter. “It’s the wind,” they tell me. I guess they mean the winds that are generated by all the tall buildings. I’m guessing it wasn’t so windy before Manhatta became Manhattan. Someone who knows about this stuff, chime in here. ↩︎
3. I am shaking my head here. The lesbians I have known IRL have always been complete characters, and all in unique ways, just like every other person I have known. No author who knows a lesbian IRL has any excuse to write a lesbian who disappears into the background. ↩︎
4. Like that Polar Bears do not live in Antarctica. Which you should have remembered from reading Encyclopedia Brown as a kid. ↩︎
5. Except maybe Cold People, which I wrote about a few days ago. ↩︎