For all its faults and its’
brief forays into the corny and trite, Snowblind, a novel by author Christopher
Golden is a novel I really needed to read after a series of rather hard and challenging
books, and the perfect book to round out the first half of my year’s reading
list before I take a five day break. This superior horror novel shares a lot
with Stephen King’s third novel Salem’s Lot, and it does for snow what that
novel did for small towns. It has a rather unique setup, and find it hard to believe
that snow has been used so rarely as a tool for terror and dread, and Golden
skillfully crafts each of those emotions, and the fact that we care so deeply
about the semi-large cast of characters tend to elevate this book past a lot of
schmaltz, some failures to suspend disbelief, and a rather tepid climax, which I
tend to befall many books in this genre. One night during a snowstorm in Coventry,
New Hampshire, a mysterious force takes the lives of eighteen people. Twelve years
later, another storm is on the horizon, and those affected most by the
blizzard, a cop who watched a boy he was trying to save disappear, an oddball
police photographer who watched his brother pulled to his death by some
nefarious force, a petty criminal whose wife lost her life while he was getting
drunk, a couple who found each other while snowed in even when the man’s mother
was killed, must contend with the evil that destroyed their lives twelve years
before: an evil in search of something hidden within some of the citizen’s of Coventry.
Golden’s attention to detail is very good: even on a hot day it was easy to
feel the chill that the characters do. Some characters are paper thin, like a
burly police detective and a pair of two bit criminals to go along with some of
the book’s other mentioned faults, but this book was a pure blast, and its
final lines, as Stephen King promised, are chilling (no pun intended) enough to
grab you by the throat.
Rating: 4/
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