Snowblind by Christopher Golden

Published by St. Martin's Press on January 21, 2014

People die in blizzards, usually by crashing their cars, freezing to death, or having heart attacks while shoveling heavy snow. But during the worst blizzard that Coventry, Massachusetts has seen in many years, people die for mysterious reasons, after hearing whispers in the wind and feeling the chill of icy fingers. Twelve years later, people in Coventry still get nervous when it snows, remembering the eighteen deaths. The dead have an impact on the characters who make up the ensemble cast of Snowblind, an imaginative and (pardon the expression) moderately chilling horror novel that makes me glad I no longer live in blizzard country.

Having lost his job and then his wife during the blizzard, Doug Manning has focused his disintegrating life on a series of small-time burglaries. He attracts the suspicion of Joe Keenan, a police detective who is haunted by memories of the child who died in his arms when he was a uniformed cop on patrol during the blizzard. Jake Schapiro, whose little brother died in the blizzard, is now a part-time police photographer. TJ Farrelly, a musician/electrician, was thrown into the arms of the woman who is now his wife during the storm, but that relationship is fraying and their daughter ... well, when another storm comes, their daughter's behavior is unsettling -- as is true of many of the people who interact with the main characters.

I don't go out of my way to read horror fiction but there are good stories to be told in every genre. Snowblind tells a good story. It does so by putting characters first, by creating people who seem real, who are easy to care about, and by letting the reader experience vicarious fear when those characters are endangered or encounter the unknown. Christopher Golden relies on psychological horror rather than blood and gore which, for me, is a more effective means of triggering emotions.

Much of the novel revolves around the low-key domestic dramas in which the central characters are involved. Tension builds slowly as the characters confront the dangers that lurk in the new storm, but it never climaxes in a truly frightening moment as does the best horror fiction. It does, however, reveal the turmoil of the characters as they wrestle with their inner demons, and those provide better drama than the creatures that inhabit the wind and snow.

Sometimes the story is a little obvious -- it is fairly easy to figure out why people are behaving strangely -- and I'm not sure whether Golden meant for the secret to be so easily guessed. I found it difficult to buy into the phenomenon that drives the story, in part because it isn't convincingly described and in part because it is too easily battled in the end, but I liked the characters so much that my reservations about the plot were not a serious obstacle to my enjoyment of the novel.

RECOMMENDED

Doomed by Chuck Palahniuk

Published by Doubleday on October 8, 2013

Is it possible to base an entire novel on potty humor? Not many serious writers would have the audacity to try, and few of those would pull it off as capably as Chuck Palahniuk. Doomed, the sequel to Damned, is a send-up of religion, Hollywood parenting, and hypocrisy in all its guises. Humor of this nature is difficult to sustain, so it's fortunate that Doomed isn't overly long. Sometimes Palahniuk's satire is too over-the-top to be effective; other times it is spot on. Most of the time, Doomed is amusing. On occasion, it is outrageously funny.

Dead, fat thirteen-year-old Madison Spencer, the daughter of a billionaire tax dodging environmentalist father and a New Age actress mother, is experiencing a mid-death crisis. She suffers from postmortem depression and is blogging about it on her PDA. Satan has trapped her on Earth, in a sort of purgatory. By communicating with the predead, Madison has inadvertently inspired a new religion called Boorism that is based on cursing, belching, racial slurs, and ... well, you get the drift. As Madison blogs about her own predeath (her motto: "I irritate; therefore I am"), she reveals some truly awful and truly funny events from her childhood, including one that takes place in a public men's room. (Warning: Not everyone will find it funny. A taste for the macabre helps. And since the incident involves an erect member that the little girl mistakes for something quite different, some readers will find it offensive.)

Riffs on Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and on the Bible contribute to the offbeat humor, as well as an unusual prophesy of the End Times (which involves something called Madlantis, where dwells a baby-thing conceived inside a lipstick-and-chocolate coated latex sheath that is tossed out the window of a Lincoln Town Car as it drives down Hollywood Boulevard). I enjoyed the humor and the prose more than the story (which often seems to be searching for a point), but maybe Palahniuk's random acts of satire are the point. In any event, I enjoyed the novel so I'm recommending it, but this is far from Palahniuk's best work.

RECOMMENDED

The Thicket by Joe Lansdale

Published by Mulholland Books on September 10, 2013

Give Joe Lansdale credit for versatility. He's written mysteries and suspense novels, science fiction and horror, comic books and cartoons. If he isn't making your bones shake with fear, he's making your teeth rattle with laughter. The Thicket is an old-fashioned western with a modern sensibility and a considerable amount of humor. Many books make me smile but few make me laugh-out-loud. This one did, repeatedly -- when I wasn't gagging at Lansdale's descriptions of carnage and mayhem.

In an attention-grabbing first sentence, we learn that sixteen-year-old Jack Parker will "take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big angry hog" before finding true love and killing someone. After Jack's parents (like many others in East Texas) die of smallpox, Jack's grandfather decides to send Jack and his sister Lola to live with their aunt in Kansas. Before they travel far, desperados make off with Lola. Hence Jack's need to take up with gun-shooting folk who can help him track the bad guys. Eustace, the slave's son, is a semi-reliable tracker. Shorty, the gun-shooting dwarf, learned his craft from Annie Oakley. The angry hog is named Hog. Eventually a woman of ill-repute named Jimmie Sue joins the posse, as well as two others. The search take them to the Big Thicket, a hiding place for all things evil.

It's easy to feel sympathy for Jack, who does his best to maintain his naïve innocence despite his dark experiences in a rough world, and for Jimmie Sue, who has had a difficult life. More surprising is the sympathy Lansdale creates for Eustace and Shorty. They are violent and greedy but not truly evil -- they generally direct their violence (if not their thievery) at people who deserve it -- and their status as underdogs makes it easy to cheer for them. Some of the characters are so outrageous that liking them isn't an issue, including the sheriff who only ever shot three women "in the line of duty, or nearabouts." As always, Lansdale creates landscapes and attitudes that draw the reader into the time and place in which the novel is set.

The Thicket is often a funny novel but it isn't shallow. Lansdale's characters occasionally debate the meaning of life, paying particular attention to faith and prayer. Jack's grandfather taught him that comforting religious beliefs are preferable to thinking "too much on my own, cause it might lead to other ideas that might be right but unpleasant." Shorty argues that faith in God's will leads to "disappointment and false expectations." Jack's Christian teachings, cautioning against vengeance and urging him to turn the other cheek, are at odds with the more violent but arguably more effective methods that Eustace and Shorty believe will help them find Lola. Still, this isn't a heavy philosophical tome. Lansdale uses the discussions of morality to poke good natured fun at hypocrisy.

Some aspects of the story (like the hooker with a heart of gold) are clichéd but the clichés are played for laughs -- and more often than not Lansdale gives the cliché a little twist. Fans of shoot-outs will be amused by the most hilarious gunfight I've encountered. Gore aside, The Thicket left me smiling.

RECOMMENDED

Original Skin by David Mark

Published by Blue Rider Press on May 16, 2013

Like the first novel featuring Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy, Original Skin tells a story that is more interesting than suspenseful. Its focus is on the political ramifications of crime and on the relationships that continue to develop among the series' characters. This isn't a novel of shootouts and chase scenes, although enough action and humor are mixed into the story to keep it from becoming dry.

Suzie is into anonymous hook-ups (formerly known as swinging) and uses a website to find them. Her best friend, a gay man named Simon Appleyard, does the same. After Simon dies, having apparently hung himself, repeated attempts are made on Suzie's life. McAvoy gets involved after he finds a cell phone in a stream, brings it home, dries it out, and discovers it belonged to Simon. The methodical McAvoy follows a rare hunch and comes to believe that Simon was murdered. His investigation leads him to a number of political figures who, like Suzie, have been playing sordid games. The story turns into a whodunit with all the plot twists, distractions, and red herrings that keep a reader guessing about the killer's identity. It's a bit convoluted but not outrageously so. The mystery isn't captivating -- its resolution has an anticlimactic feel -- but it held my attention.

That plotline develops alongside another as a relatively benign Vietnamese gang that has controlled Hull's cannabis supply is being muscled out by a more violent group of criminals. McAvoy's boss, Trish Pharaoh, is attacked by dogs and singed by a petrol bomb as she tries to get a handle on the situation. McAvoy, in the meantime, finds himself challenged to a bare-knuckle brawl in the name of honor. The plot thread involving the gangsters is largely used for character development, although it has some entertaining moments.

The characters are actually better than the story they inhabit. Aector is a good man who wants people to be good to each other. He doesn't care about arrest statistics or office politics. He's embarrassed, even angered, when his colleagues disparage people because of their ancestry. He's even more embarrassed when the topic turns to sex -- particularly the kinkier versions that he encounters during the course of the story. He's devoted to his wife and blushes with shame when he finds himself thinking, even momentarily, about another woman's body. His Old World prudishness is charming, but it's his essential decency that makes him such a likable character. Secondary characters are taking shape (particularly Aector's wife, who comes from a dubious background, and Pharaoh, who has a knack for making Aector uncomfortable); I expect they'll continue to be fleshed out in future installments.

Sensitive readers should know that the narrative describes scenes of torture. They aren't gratuitous or overly graphic, but some might find them disturbing. There are also some discussions of sex clubs and related diversions that didn't strike me as graphic at all, but the strong sexual content might offend some readers.

RECOMMENDED

Flora by Gail Godwin

Published by Bloomsbury USA on May 7, 2013 

A keen observer of life, Gail Godwin is both a student and a teacher of human nature. Her novels tend to be probing studies of characters who struggle with their disconnection from the world around them.

At the age of ten (going on eleven), Helen Anstruther has already developed the most disagreeable characteristics of her mother, who died when she was three, and of her grandmother Honora, who has just died. Helen has inherited their haughty sense of superiority, their tendency to see the worst in others. Her mother's twenty-two-year-old cousin, Flora Waring, is recruited to look after Helen during the summer, when Helen's father (a principal during the school year) will be away supervising construction of buildings that will house the Manhattan Project. Although Flora has earned a teaching degree and is hoping for a job offer in the fall, she is woefully insecure, a trait that Helen feeds upon. Helen regards Flora as white trash from Alabama, a hugely embarrassing addition to her life. At the same time, she is blind to the faults of the father and grandmother who raised her.

Two children in town have contracted polio, causing Helen's father to issue an injunction from afar: Helen is not to leave the house. Although Helen complains, she feels a strong connection to the house, still full of her grandmother's things. The house, once a home to recovering tuberculosis patients (less charitably described as "a halfway house for rich malingerers"), is virtually a character in the novel. Helen's isolation isn't truly troubling. She has little use for friends (as one of them complains, she forgets she has them when they aren't around); she lives largely within her own imaginative mind.

Helen parcels out her time, instructing Flora on the art of being a teacher and, when she can, sneaking a peek at the letters her grandmother wrote to Flora over the years -- letters that reveal family secrets in guarded language that Helen isn't old enough to understand. As Helen makes her way through the summer, she develops a crush on the delivery boy from the grocery store, a young man named Finn whose physical and mental issues earned him a medical discharge from the Army. That he is Flora's age does not deter Helen from viewing Flora as an unworthy competitor for his attention.

Every now and then an older voice intrudes, an adult Helen filled with unfashionable remorse as she looks back on that formative summer. The richness of the characters is astonishing, given the novel's brevity. While we usually see Flora through Helen's unreliable eyes, we see her from a different perspective when we read Honora's letters or hear Finn describing her. While Helen is convinced that she is spending her summer educating Flora, it is actually Flora who teaches the novel's most valuable lessons.

Flora is, in fact, the story of the lessons Helen learned from a teacher she despised: that other people's lives are as worthy as her own; that their tragedies are more real, and more serious, than her own self-invented woes; that risking the pain of opening our hearts to others is essential to a fulfilling life. Godwin tells this dramatic story in radiant but understated prose; even a bombshell in the concluding pages explodes quietly. This is a story that touches feelings without obvious manipulation, a book that fills a reader with joy and sorrow in the same instant and leaves the reader wondering how that's possible.

RECOMMENDED