Ararat
by Christopher Golden
Summary
An earthquake and avalanche on Mount Ararat crack open a cave high on the Turkish mountain, and inside is the find of the century: the timbers of an enormous ancient ship, buried at an altitude where no ship can be. Meryam and Adam, adventurers and engaged documentary makers, race competitors up the mountain to claim the discovery, and the expedition that assembles in the cave, archaeologists, scholars brought in to authenticate or debunk the ark claim, a UN observer, guides, and a priest, finds in the ship's deepest chamber a sealed coffin, its lid crawling with symbols no specialist recognizes, and inside it a mummified cadaver with horns.
Golden runs the setup as a siege. A storm closes the mountain, the team beds down inside the find, and the thing from the coffin, whatever moved out of it when the seals broke, begins working through them, first as dreams, then as whispers in each member's native doubt, faith turned against the faithful and skepticism against the skeptics, then as something wearing colleagues. The descent that ends the book, injured climbers roped together in whiteout with the possibility that any of them is carrying the passenger, is a sustained set piece of altitude and paranoia.
The ark question is handled with a genre craftsman's cunning: the ship authenticates nothing except that something was imprisoned, and the demon predates every theology on the expedition.
Around three hundred pages, engineered for speed.
Best for readers who want the expedition horror formula executed at peak efficiency, The Thing's paranoia at Sinai altitude.
Historical Context & Significance
Ararat won the Bram Stoker Award for 2017, the most traditional adventure horror to take the prize in years, a make it move manifesto amid the era's ambiguity school, and its author's standing made the win a career acknowledgment: Christopher Golden had spent more than two decades as one of the field's engines, dozens of novels, the Baltimore and Joe Golem collaborations with Mike Mignola, Buffy tie ins, and anthologies that shaped the market.
The book launched a loose series, the Ben Walker occult thrillers continuing in Pandora Room and Red Hands, and its film rights moved quickly through development announcements.
Its Stoker year snapshot is instructive: Golden's classical monster siege beating the literary wing's candidates recorded the award's constituency, working horror writers voting for the craft values the genre's paperback tradition runs on, executed by one of their own institution builders.