I'll be honest - I had several reasons to want to enjoy this story. It takes place in a setting I'm intimately familiar with, having been born and raised among the Scandinavian ice fishermen of northern Minnesota, and did a good job of capturing that unique atmosphere. It was gruesome and creepy, and really quite a good storyline over all. However, three very non-trivial things just kept surfacing (no pun intended) to keep me from enjoying this.
First, it was incredibly predictable. Not cliche, necessarily, but horrendously predictable. I think this same storyline could have been written in a way that doesn't make the ending so obvious and it would have had a much stronger effect. Second, I found a lot of Arnold's language to grate on my nerves in a borderline-cliche way. For instance: "The ice was ten inches thick. Plenty thick, yet it still didn’t compare to the rind of ice that had settled around his heart." Somehow lines like this came out as both over-the-top and expected, not in a good way. And thirdly, while I knew immediately that the mother was the bait, I don't feel like we got enough of a glimpse at the mother's character to actually feel pity for her, let alone believe that the son would resurface from death to her. We never got so much as a hint at the mother-son relationship; it makes it hard to buy.
That said, I have to admit that Wright really has a voice meant for horror podcasts. I enjoyed his narration quite a lot, despite the Scottish brogue Sven the Scandinavian seemed to speak and the occassional too-long pauses that cast a melodramatic air on the story. His voice seems to echo creepily in a listener's head long after he's done speaking.