Whiteout Conditions

Ant is back in Chicago for a funeral, and he typically enjoys funerals. Since most of his family has passed away, he finds himself strangely attracted to their endearing qualities: the hyperbolic language, the stoner altar boy, seeing friends in suits for the first time. That is, until the tragic death of Ray — Ant’s childhood friend, Vince’s teenage cousin. Ray was the younger third-wheel that Ant and Vince were stuck babysitting while in high school, and his sudden death makes national news.

In the depths of a brutal Midwest winter, Ant rides with Vince through the falling snow to Ray’s funeral, an event that has been accruing a sense of consequence. With a poet’s sensibility, Shah navigates the murky responsibilities of adulthood, grief, toxic masculinity, and the tragedy of revenge in this haunting Midwestern noir."Whiteout Conditions is grim and, occasionally, viscerally upsetting. But it is also frequently, darkly funny... Shah is a published poet, and it shows in Whiteout Conditions’ prose."
—Thea De Armond, Cleveland Review of Books

"'Funerals are kind of fun,' the narrator of Shah’s debut admits in the opening pages. 'I’ve cultivated a taste.' Then his childhood friend dies, and the narrator must brave a blizzard to pay his respects."
—Azam Ahmed, New York Times

"Whiteout Conditions contains the language of a poet-turned-fiction writer... and the beauty of the phrasing is often in pointed contrast to the goofy stupidity of the characters’ actions... Whiteout Conditions is a book concerned with toxic masculinity’s erasure of the self; it’s walls and moats. In the face of death, Ant and Vince concentrate on hurting each other, drinking, taking drugs, pursuing inadvisable revenge plots — anything to plug the hole where their heartache dwells."
—Caryl Pagel, Full Stop

"A dazzling narrative about loss, coping mechanisms, and vengeance."
—Ruth Minah Buchwald, Electric Literature

"Ant is borderline obsessed with funerals, likening the events to weddings as gatherings he looks forward to. Yet, when a childhood friend passes, Ant’s veneer starts to crumble. Weirdly funny, Whiteout Conditions tracks Ant and his friend Vince as they make their way through Chicogoland’s suburbs, which, in Shah’s telling, are as harrowing as any arctic climate."
—Wendy J. Fox, BuzzFeed

"Whiteout Conditions is both disorienting and visceral, hilarious and heartbreaking."
—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books Tariq Shah, born and raised in Illinois, writes fiction and poetry, and has work appearing or forthcoming in Jubilat, Heavy Feather Review, No, Dear Magazine, ANMLY (fka Drunken Boat), Gravel, BlazeVox, and other publications. From 2007-2009, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mozambique, and he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn, where he now teaches. His chapbook, heart assist device, was a finalist for the 2019 no, dear/small anchor press chapbook series. Whiteout Conditions is his first novel.