A pulse-pounding SF/Thriller hybrid that feels like a modern day episode of The X-Files.
Fiona Hawthrone has a problem. Her best friend Alva, a researcher in the titular Atacama desert in South America is dead, along with the entirety of her team... and all the signs point to something like murder. There’s not a lot that Fiona can do about it from all the way in eastern Tennessee, but soon she is wrapped up in the mystery of her death, a strange and powerful corporation, and something else, even more unexpected. Something impossible. Something extraordinary.
This is the story of Jendia Gammon’s Atacama.
In the tagline above, I mentioned The X-Files, and I do think that using that as the model is the best way to describe and follow the throughline of the book. After a strange in medias res prologue (that appears to be actually an excerpt from a different story altogether set in the same verse), we are plunged into the at-first quotidian life of Dr. Fiona Hawthorne. We get a “bang” of an opener right away as she gets the news the entire expedition to the Atacama that included her friend Alva is dead, no sign of the bodies, nothing. Fiona is then inexorably, piece by piece caught up in a whirlwind of intrigue as, given that she is Alva’s best friend, a number of parties come to call on her, not all of them with her best interest in mind. And of course she wants to know what happened to Alva, and what it all means.
Thus, for a good portion of the book, there is only the barest hint of a SFF tone to the book, the book preferring to the technothriller slash mystery and also a deep dive into Fiona’s character and life. We get a strong sense of her as a character, as someone who has had Alva’s death push her off what was already a precarious cliff. A lot of the novel is her working through her friend’s death and what it means for her, and for those around her. Gammon does the emotional and psychological beats of this rather well, bringing us firmly into Fiona’s mindset and her precarious state. (the entire book is from her point of view).
And as you might expect, eventually, all roads lead to the Atacama desert, and Fiona finding out what is really going on and what happened to Alva and the remainder of her team. The time in eastern Tennessee is the prelude, background and foundation for Fiona’s fateful trip to South America. And the point is made that Eastern Tennessee is a very different place, in terms of physical geography and environment, than the driest of deserts, the Atacama. It’s quite the cultural and physical shock for Fiona when she goes there, and a writing shock as well.¹
There are some mysterious goings on in Tennesse. However when it does come time to really ramp up the genre elements (and I should be clear, that also includes notes of horror that we saw before in Tennessee, but really get a real dose of here), mysterious doings at the college, the strange corporation known as Cuprum, and the slow unveiling of what is really going on, the trip to the Atacama and what is there and why really bring this facet of the novel to life. Since the unraveling of that secret and what it is and what it means is really a treasure to be savored, I do have to draw a curtain around the central mystery of the book. I do point at my earlier statement that this really is an X-Files episode in tone. Mysterious doings, a character under pressure, and a mysterious entity, and the mysterious Cuprum.
Although there are a set of interesting characters around Fiona (including Alva, whom we get to know of, after death), Cuprum is the star of the book that I really want to discuss besides Fiona herself. While she has that interesting set of co-stars and characters to bounce off of, where the book really sings, aside from its central mystery and genre element, is Cuprum. If you like weird faceless corporations with that sinister and higher-tech-than-anyone-should-have sort of vibe, Cuprum is here for you. This is an advancement, a evolution from the days of the X-Files where it would have been a quasi or fully government agency that was behind what is going on. Here, Gammon goes with the times to a very creepy international corporation with an unknown agenda and even more unknown and unearthly technology at its disposal.
There is a piece of tech, though, that Cuprum employs in the book that I didn’t quite accept as being realistic. It’s necessary for the plot, especially for the denouement, but given the ending, I think it is not strictly necessary, and given that it did somewhat break my suspension of disbelief a bit, I think it could have been done without or handled somewhat differently. Otherwise, the resolution of the story and the mystery and the “sting in the tail” at the end of the novel are all very classic X-files like techniques which are really employed here well.
That’s the thing about this novel. It’s definitely more mystery, strange occurrences, X-Files-esque feel and tone, with a strong side dish of personal growth, a strong sense of place (both in Eastern Tennessee and in the Atacama) than it really is a straight up science fiction novel.It sits near the borders of science fiction, technothriller and even mystery. It feels also, for all of its genre elements, to be a very personal, introspective and a story of the author’s heart. There is a real care and touch to Fiona’s life and story here that feels weirdly intimate, and it helped draw me into her story, and the story of the novel in general.
I want to say a few words about the writing, because it really needs a little more highlighting beyond what I’ve said before. Be it the interiority of Fiona’s head and mind as she is going through a lot of trauma (a real highlight of the book to treat such a subject with such care in the writing) or the descriptions of the locales, or the twisting plot and intrigue, the writing flows smoothly and well. The novel is a complicated piece of moving parts, but the author is always on top of what is happening, and plays fair with the reader at the same time. On a sentence by sentence level, there is a strong execution of the craft here, and the overall structure of the plotting is very sound. I keep going back to the X-Files as my touchstone here, but this really is like a good X-Files episode: crisp, well paced, and page-turning.
Finally it should be noted that the novel is also illustrated gorgeously, from the cover, through each chapter, to the end, a real compliment to the writing. Overall, this makes the experience of reading the book lush, inventive and immersive. It may be less strongly genre than maybe I would have liked, but it was an excellent and entertaining read.
Highlights:
- Immersive writing with a strong character focus
- Excellent X-Files like feel
- Strong sense of place both in Tennessee and in the deadly desert
Reference: Gammon, Jendia, Atacama, [Sley House Publishing, 2025]
¹ Given the recent terrible flooding and damage done to this region by Hurricane Helene, the parts of the novel set in Eastern Tennessee hit even harder than they normally would. Also, I was also reminded of the TV series The Peripheral, which has its setting in the same area (in point of fact, the town where much of that footage was filmed was particularly hard hit by the hurricane).
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.