A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons
My rating: 3/5 cats
oh my god thank you dan simmons!
……………………………………………………………..
oh, dan simmons, i wish you had dedicated the terror to me instead of this one. spooky month is not going as well as i had hoped…
this is fine. it is a very straightforward, classic-feeling horror novel, like an early stephen king or something, and i still think simmons is a good writer, but this one just didn’t thrill me the way the terror did.
it is at once a psychological horror novel and a traditional-ish ghost story, with some mythology thrown in for spice. it is tricky business, because we have a character who is medicated after a suicide attempt, returning to his hometown and his deceased childhood friend’s house to try his hand at an autobiographical novel (ummm, summer of night??)* , and he finds himself isolated in a cell phone dead zone, and facing a triple threat of ghosties, skinheads, and the horror of his own mind and his guiltish memories. so – what is “real” and what is delusion and what is self-punishment? the reader is kept guessing, and it is perfectly readable and page-turning, but it lacked that special “oomph” that would have turned this from a serviceable novel into a shiverlicious one.
i did like all the nerdishness, with the henry james and the beowulf quotes, and all the english-major memories (and how many horror novels have proust in them, sparking a turning point for the character??) it was dorky good times.
but it just wasn’t enough for me, i guess. i need something less…expected – i need a horror novel that is going to scare me, but it just never happens for me. i am scared of plenty of real things, but books have to work really hard to give me the bumps.
this would probably scare someone else more than it did me – the dogs in particular – but alas, to a karen, it remains “fine.”
* it would have been nice for me to have known that this was a sequel to summer of night, because now i guess i know how summer of night ends up, and now i am less inclined to read it anytime soon, even though it is sitting right there. i see that goodreads has helpfully called this “seasons of horror #2,” but the book itself did not. sigh.
