An orphan is recruited to join a band of sex workers headed into Canada’s beastly north in Davine’s historical horror novel.

A gold rush is on in the Klondike, and men are swarming into the cold mountains of northern Canada. Fourteen-year-old Miss Laura was raised in a Catholic orphanage. She knows Miss Laura isn’t her name; it’s just what the Sisters call her. (Try as she might, she can’t remember the real one.) She flees the orphanage one day after sensing a voice calling to her from beyond the fence. During the night she spends in the woods, she encounters a horrible creature: “Something outside moved. It breathed deep and long through no human nose. Sucking and expelling. So great the creature’s weight that though its footfalls were measured and soft there seemed to be a displacement of the very night the beast moved through.” She’s rescued by a young hunter and ends up in the care of the local constable, who puts her in a jail cell with two other troublesome girls: pretty blond Jennifer and dark, surly Vera. The girls give Miss Laura a new name: Eliza Sky. After a night that features a second encounter with the mysterious beast, the constable releases the three girls into the service of Madam Tigra Volana, a woman who’s recruiting “actresses” for her traveling frontier show. Tigra plans to follow the Yukon River north to the boomtown of Dawson City. “It’s as mean as it gets,” she warns. “Don’t be surprised if you find yourself tricking clients double-time just to keep warm at night.” Keeping warm is only one of many concerns on the hard road north through camps and forests, ending at the abandoned theater Tigra mistakenly purchased in the ghost town of Forty Mile. The characters they meet along the way hold plenty of danger, but not as much as the beast that seems to stalk them—a creature the Indigenous Métis people call the Rougarou, or werewolf.

So much about the novel is promising, including its frosty Yukon setting, its supernatural element, and the frontier culture of gold rush prospectors, suppliers, and sex workers. There’s rarely a moment in which readers’ hairs won’t be standing on end. The book would be much better, though, if Davine were not so stingy with information. Key data—characters’ names and motivations, even the setting—is withheld for many pages, making it difficult for readers to orient themselves within the story. The author’s slippery prose style often leads to confusing syntax: “It touched some nerve near her heart and the girl looked down at the door that had saved her from the yet amorphous nightmare that the very people who had inadvertently fed and watered her might have known better the shape of in their final moments. Better the horror of. The pain.” Even so, the book has much to enjoy, especially for fans of historical horror fiction. Davine has no trouble persuading readers that the realities of the time and place—particularly for women—were just as terror-inducing as any supernatural monster.

An imperfect but inspired horror novel set during the Yukon gold rush.

North American Indigenous people clash with Vikings in this historical drama.

In the 10th century, Straumfjord is a Norse settlement in Vinland, founded by Icelandic explorer Lief Eiriksson. The Norse chieftains, who battle over newly settled territories in the area, such as Markland, must also contend with the skraelingjar, or savages, their term for Indigenous people. The latter live lives in harmony with the seasons, and they remain wary of the “Pale Ones,” who enslave people. When Indigenous teenager Madawaak sees the settlers slaughtering each other, he reports back to Oonban, his tribal elder. (Madawaak is in love with the man’s teenage daughter, Demasduit, who likes to hunt, which isn’t a traditional activity for women in her culture.) Oonban and the other village elders realize that upheaval is imminent and that a confrontation may be inevitable due to the Pale Ones’ growing presence on the coast. A raid on Straumfjord nearly succeeds before Freydis Eiriksdottir, Lief’s half sister, returns from exile. She’d been banished from Vinland after murdering women and children against explicit orders. Now she wants Vinland to launch a new Norse empire, safe from the encroaching cultures of Europe. Although she’s unpopular among the settlers, Freydis wins Gunnlogi, her brother’s sword, through trial by combat. She promises to eliminate or enslave the skraelingjar, but after Mooaumook, one of the Indigenous people, is captured, Freydis makes him a promise instead. Eventually, Oonban believes that he must marry Demasduit off to his people’s longtime enemies, the Farther People, in order to create a pact against the Pale Ones. Soon, the strong-willed Demasduit’s fate becomes entwined with Freydis’.

Davine channels a tremendous amount of research into this drama about a pivotal era in North American history. Vinland itself becomes a vivid presence in the story due to lines such as “The Broken Lands...got their name because of the way the ocean jutted into them. Cut deep swathes of churning brine into the open grassy plains and craggy hilltops.” There are also moments of culture shock that will fascinate readers, as when Mooaumook wonders of the Pale Ones’ horses, “How does one tame a nonhuman being?” The stories of Demasduit, Mooaumook, and Madawaak provide the emotional center of the narrative, but over the course of the novel, Davine’s character arcs lean toward darkness, denying many people safe endings, except in cases in which it’s least expected; in this, the author courts George R.R. Martin's audience, as the violence—and the pervasive bleakness—will strongly remind readers of A Game of Thrones (1996). There are scenes that depict rape and molten steel poured down someone’s throat as well as battles in which “Giant axes…cleaved [people] down their shoulders and split their necks or their chests.” Detailed gore isn’t out of place in a war novel, but the gratuitous descriptions become fatiguing, and what begins as an adventure ends up creaking under the weight of a grim realism. Still, Davine’s work is often effective, although he rakes readers over the coals for the denouement.

A well-crafted, if exceptionally violent, tale of conflict.