
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: horror, science fiction, technothriller, thriller
Pages: 400
Published by Angry Robot on February 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
World War III rages, and the scientists at the South Pole are thankful for the isolation – until a group of Chinese scientists arrive at the American research base with a dead man in their truck. The potential for a geopolitical firestorm is great, and, with no clear jurisdiction, the Americans don’t know what to do. But they soon realize the Chinese scientists have brought far more with them than the body…
Within seventy-two hours, thirteen others lie dead in the snow, murdered in acts of madness and superhuman strength. An extremophile parasite from the truck, triggered by severe cold, is spreading by touch. With rescue impossible for months, it is learning from them. Evolving. It triggers violent tendencies in the winter crew, and, more insidiously… The beginnings of a strange symbiotic telepathy.
From an exciting new voice comes this propulsive SF-thriller, infused with authentic details about life in one of the world’s harshest, most mysterious landscapes, Antarctica.
My Review:
Four years from now – just think about that for a minute. Four years from right NOW. The world is on the brink of World War III.
And that’s not necessarily the most frightening part of the story!
The fears and frights and scares and outright terrors are layered in this OMG DEBUT novel, to the point where the reader’s heart is pounding alongside all the rest of the characters. I say ‘rest’ of the characters because frankly, if this is that close then we’re already in it and it’s already all of us.

But those layers of fear may start with just thinking about how close this might be, but the part of the story that grabs the reader by the throat and doesn’t let go is the part that happens far, far away, in the remotest place on Earth.
Over an entirely too short 72 hours in the midst of the long Antarctic winter, the tiny overwinter crew at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is reduced from 41 scientists, technicians and support crew to just FIVE scarred and scared survivors after the station is invaded.
In the midst of the Third World War that is happening in the world at large, the crew at the U.S. controlled South Pole fears that the vehicle heading their way from the Chinese-controlled Dome A is the vanguard of that invasion.
And it is – but not in the way that anyone thinks. It’s not the three starving Chinese men who are the threat – it’s the dead man in the back, the one who dashed himself against the walls until he died.
He had a passenger. (Technically, the dead man had a host of passengers.) In the best SF horror thriller tradition, those passengers, a lab experiment gone much too successfully and entirely too wrong, have plans of their own.

Escape Rating A+: There are so many ways to think/talk/write about Symbiote – and they ALL work. The whole thing was a WOW. (Admittedly, a WOW I had to stop reading at 1 am, even though I had less than an hour left. I could have finished. And I’d probably have been awake for the rest of the night as a result. It’s that kind of WOW.)
The horrors, as I said, are layered. There’s the World War III aspect, which is touched on just enough to give the reader the shivers, which then gets subsumed in all the other horrors, only to rear its ugly head again at the end.
Underneath the World War III scares and the political maneuverings that go with it is the horror so brilliantly pointed out in the first Jurassic Park movie, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The results are not actually dissimilar, although part of the horror leans a bit on another famous, and much older quote from Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
One of the biggest, and most in the moment layers of the horrors in Symbiote is very definitely the human equation.

The small crew of overwinter “polies” is, as they are every year, alternately hard working and bored, often introverted but stuck in the enforced intimacy of a VERY TINY small town, isolated from the whole entire rest of the world and quite possibly just a bit – or a lot – cracked in one way or another.
There’s also a deep, resentful divide between the scientists – the ‘beakers’, and the techs and support crew – the ‘loggers’. On top of that there’s a huge gender imbalance, three men for every woman. It’s a pressure cooker on multiple axes and the stew gets aside to cook for a nine-month season. It’s not really a surprise that it boils over at the best of times – which this particular overwinter absolutely is not.
In other words, the story in Symbiote had more than enough stress factors to go to the ‘dark side’ from the human parts of the equation alone. And to some extent those human factors continue to drive events even after not all the humans are exactly still or just merely human.
And it’s those human factors that give the story its compulsive, breakneck pace. Because it’s the humans that we care about – and we do. We absolutely do. From the beginning, when it just seems like the scares come from humans just being human and some of them being shitty humans, we already have our hero, our sidekicks and most definitely our villains.

As the snow gets deeper and the shit gets WAY more complicated, so do the motivations of ALL the players – and the reader gets even more invested as each character learns something new and shitty about themselves – and stands or folds under the weight of that knowledge.
I got so caught up in this story I barely stopped to sleep while I still could. When I finished, I found the ending cathartic enough – and yet still open. Because it reads like this chapter may be done, but there is plenty of story yet to come.
As there should be. Because the survivors have merely managed to survive the horror they faced in their isolated base. The huge, horrifying issues that brought this mess to their snowy doorstep are out in the wider world – and have yet to be addressed. Even though one of those messes already clearly has plans to address them.