The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams

Published by William Morrow on January 3, 2023

This strange story is filled with the low-key humor that comes from transplanting characters who might be at home in The Office or Severance to an arctic research station. The station has been closed but not abandoned. Only four people haunt the empty building. Gilroy is the only remaining researcher. Without lab equipment, he conducts his research by staring into space and making notes. He wants to “get in touch with the cold,” which he envisions as a malicious entity whose “end goal” is “a full-blown castration of the soul.” The other three are maintenance workers who perform such important tasks as opening and closing doors to determine whether they make noise and, if so, to record the volume and source of the noise so that repairs can be scheduled.

As the supervisor of the three maintenance workers, Hart completes the paperwork associated with their assignments (filling in the blank that follows such questions as “How many chairs need replacement?” after they sit on each chair and shift from side to side). Hart places the completed forms in a drop box on the roof. Pat, his boss, dispatches a weekly helicopter to collect the forms and drop off new assignments.

Hart is convinced that their work is of the utmost importance. Researchers might die if they fail to identify work surfaces that are not perfectly flat (the tragic accidents and ensuing chaos he envisions are imaginative but implausible). Hart is sometimes paralyzed by the fear of making an error. His coworkers do not seem to share that fear; they’re simply unmotivated.

Hart believes he is locked in a power struggle with Gibbs, who clearly (and perhaps correctly) thinks she can lead the team more capably than Hart. Cline regards himself as an artist, but he doesn’t ask for art supplies to be delivered on the weekly supply run because he’s not sure he wants to paint a landscape of snow.

The tasks assigned to Hart’s team are so pointless that Hart has lost track of whether the team has done them before. They often need to start over because they become distracted and can’t recall, for example, whether they rolled all the window shades in a particular room up and down. Hart wonders whether the nature of monotonous work might “propel it straight past a casual memory into the arena of trauma, where it would likely be repressed?”

The concept of inept workers struggling to perform tedious make-work chores is funny, but the nature of the workplace adds to the novel’s humor. After a windy night, the workers see something in the snow. They can’t identify it. They aren’t sure whether it moves when they aren’t watching it. When they stare at it, hours elapse. In fact, lost hours are common in the facility, at least for Hart, who can never remember how he spent his weekends. In fact, Hart has lost track of how long the team has been working at the facility.

When Hart sends Pat a Post-It note asking if she knows about the thing in the snow, she asks for more information. The three workers quarrel about who should prepare a description. Rather than collaborating, they decide to resolve their differences with a writing contest, then argue about who wrote the best description of a lamp. Their dysfunction as members of a team is hilarious, although instantly recognizable to anyone who has been part of a dysfunctional team. Pat’s eventual response to the question about the thing in the snow produces something approaching panic, followed by another series of failed experiments.

In addition to mocking make-work jobs and teams that can’t master the art of collaboration, The Thing in the Snow questions the concept of leadership. Hart is ridiculously impressed with himself because he supervises two subordinates in a pointless job. He reads a series of novels that are meant to provide instruction or inspiration for leaders, but they fail to transform Hart into something he is not. A reader might suspect that the endless supply of “How to Be a Leader” books are equally useless. Still, the plots of the leadership novels that Hart reads are so outlandish that I would probably read them.

A contracted wellness provider whose basic care only measures body temperature within a range of 3 degrees (premium care offers whole numbers; with platinum care you get decimals) offers some of the novel's funniest moments. A story that draws humor from absurdity doesn’t need to make sense, but Sean Adams impressed me with an ending that explains why the three maintenance people and the lone researcher are really working at the facility. The novel deliberately leaves lingering questions that add to the fun. In the end, I think The Thing in the Snow is about the need to find purpose, or at least to feel a purpose, in work or in life. When a goofy story turns out to make a meaningful point, I have to recommend it.

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