Fiction: Matthew Iden: The Winter Over (Thomas & Mercer, 2017)
At first glance, The Winter Over by Matthew Iden falls into the familiar category of Antarctic thrillers where manly men face the travails of human weakness and the unforgiving environment. And indeed, superficially the book seems to have some of the characters and plot elements typical of those stories.
Its protagonist is mechanical engineer Cass Jennings who’s assigned to the fictional Shackleton South Pole Research Facility for the nine month isolation of the Antarctic winter. Soon life at the Facility starts to go wrong as hostile, malicious forces try to use it for their own purposes.
Yet this is not a macho story. By the end, its clear that the creative vision is something else altogether, something more humane and warm than is typical of these novels.