Review: Fever by Jordan L. Hawk

Title: Fever

Author: Jordan L. Hawk

Length: 241 Pages

Category: Historical, Horror

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: This is not a cozy story; it’s claustrophobic, which is a feat unto itself. The vast and barren environment, nothing but sky and an eerie silence, closes in, and it didn’t take much for my imagination to supply the fear of that isolation on behalf of Colin, his brother, Doug, and the small group who joined them in this frozen wasteland.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Tired of living as con artists, Colin Muir and his brother Doug join the stampede to the gold fields of the Klondike. If they can strike it rich, they’ll be wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.

But nightmares await alongside the gold. On a claim owned by a dead man, haunting voices call out from the forest, and strange tracks surround their cabin at night. In the midst of the arctic wilderness, a primordial evil has awakened, one that wants not just the brothers’ lives, but their very souls.

Review: Jordan L. Hawk does eldritch horror so well. Fever is as much about the treacherous landscape, the extreme isolation, and the cloying danger as it is the euphoric dream of striking it rich, and then the slow, creeping dread that someone, something, wants these trespassers dead. Discovering what that thing is, is a terrible, beautiful thing.

Hawk captures the sense of time and place in Fever, with the misdeeds and misfortunes of long-ago people who desecrated Native and First Nations lands in search of untold fortune. An obvious wealth of research went into the Klondike gold rush and the fever pitch of those who risked life and limb, starvation and the brutal landscape, to fulfill their lust for material wealth. This is not a cozy story; it’s claustrophobic, which is a feat unto itself. The vast and barren environment, nothing but sky and an eerie silence, closes in, and it didn’t take much for my imagination to supply the fear of that isolation on behalf of Colin, his brother, Doug, and the small group who joined them in this frozen wasteland.

Colin and Doug’s backstory is critical to the plot. It’s the secrets they keep that affect everyone else, including Steve, the man Colin loves, and everything they do. Just as doing the wrong thing exacts a heavy price, so does doing the right thing. Seeing it all unfold on the page comes with no small amount of tension, but ultimately, it comes with peace too.

History is filled with stories of misery and woe to those who dared to trek westward during the California gold rush, and those who then continued that journey into the Canadian Yukon. Some lived to tell their tales. Some didn’t. And, in this case, the soul that was already seeded with corruption would stop at nothing to get what he wanted, including death.