The Crossed Keys Chronicle

Atlas of Unknowable Things

Atlas of Unknowable Things

I’d had Atlas of Unknowable Things: A Novel by McCormick Templeman on my to-read list for at least a few months before it was released at the start of October. It sounded like it had all the hallmarks of what I look for in a good book to read around the height of spooky season. Unfortunately, dear readers, for me at least, it falls pretty short of the mark.

The book follows a protagonist named Robin Quain, who is conducting research for her dissertation. She’s writing about an anthropological theory that medieval witch hunts weren’t just attempts to track down suspected magic practitioners, but in fact were efforts to root out an ancient fertility cult that opposed Christianity. During her research, she happens upon a blog post by an academic that shows an idol she believes could be solid proof of her theories. She then manages to secure a residency at the secretive, Francophile Hildegard College in Colorado in an effort to find the idol and study it further.

She arrives in the summer, so the campus is devoid of students but still has some of the extremely odd faculty staff living there. The campus itself has all the requisite oddities: it is surrounded by dense forests and has a lake that no one is allowed to swim in, which contains an island that no one is allowed to visit. As I said at the start, this book had all the ingredients to be a dark-academia thriller, but sadly the story quickly takes some turns that soured me on the entire thing.

If you have any interest in reading the book for yourself, be warned that I’m going to get into spoiler territory now. The reason I eventually soured on the book was because it employed one of my least-favorite tropes: the unreliable narrator. As Robin settles into the college, a number of strange events occur that could easily be interpreted as supernatural or mystical. What we eventually learn, however, is that she has been the “victim” of an advanced medical procedure that has wiped parts of her memory, and much of the weirdness has been her real personality trying to reassert itself. We also learn that she is the one who wiped her own memory.

Discovering these details is not the climax of the story, though. While much of the weirdness we have been told about the college can be attributed to the memory/personality wipe, the college does in fact hold an additional terrible secret. Under the lake, accessible from the forbidden island, is a connection to some Eldritch-horror-type monsters that are being held there for research and to protect the rest of the world. In the final few pages, Robin—who is actually named Isabel—goes and confronts the underwater/underworld terrors and apparently defeats them, or at least holds them at bay. The confrontation itself and the climax are delivered so quickly and with so little detail that it is hard to know what really happens.

If you enjoy unreliable-narrator novels with heavy dark-academia and folk-horror vibes, then it is entirely possible you might like this book. But if you are looking for a spooky but well-thought-out plot, I’d probably recommend you look elsewhere.