Where the Dead Wait
2023 novel by Ally Wilkes
Where the Dead Wait is a 2023 historical, horror and supernatural novel by English writer Ally Wilkes. It is her second novel and was first published in the United Kingdom in December 2023 by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. The book's working title was What Passes Through.
Where the Dead Wait is a polar exploration book set in nineteenth-century Arctic. It is her second polar exploration story, the first being her debut novel, All the White Spaces (2022), which was set in early twentieth-century Antarctica.
Plot summary
Where the Dead Wait alternates between two timelines set in the Arctic Ocean. The first takes place in 1869 where William Day is an officer aboard The Reckoning, a ship searching for a Northwest Passage through the Arctic icepack. When the captain dies from scurvy, Day is forced to take command of the ship. After The Reckoning becomes trapped in the ice and food supplies run out, starvation sets in and the crew start dying. Day, with the backing of his second in command, Jesse Stevens, makes the desperate decision to resort to cannibalism to stay alive.
“Where the Dead Wait” enters the record as 2023 novel by Ally Wilkes. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Where, Dead and Wait can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q124450397. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2022 and 1869.
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This entry incorporates text from “Where the Dead Wait” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.