Ben Cassidy has strict instructions from his mother, Cass, never to return to his childhood home of Darnshaw. But when an old friend dies, he returns to investigate a computer game she was playing named Acheron.
Acheron claims it will give you all that you ask for, something Gaila, Ben's sister, knows all too well. But there is a price, and hers is to get Ben to London.
As Ben and his friends delve ever deeper into the world of Acheron, good motivations and morality begin to slip, and they find themselves falling further into corruption. Ben and Gaila could save them all, but the price for doing so might just be too high to pay...
***
Hard to believe it's only been three years since A Cold Season launched Alison Littlewood into modern horror's hallowed halls, given the indelible impression she's made to date. Her debut, selected as it was for the Richard and Judy Book Club, was widely-read and basically beloved; the British Fantasy Society deemed Path of Needles one of the best novels of the year of its release; and The Unquiet House was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson, which award Littlewood just won for her contribution to the inaugural Spectral Book of Horror Stories.
Long story short, this lady's going places. But first, because her fans demanded it, I gather, A Cold Silence ushers us back to Darnshaw—in the company of the central characters who visited that village of vacuum black and icy white in A Cold Season, even—for a deal with the devil that did next to nothing for me, I'm afraid.
A Cold Silence kicks off a decade and change later: single mother Cass may have escaped the clutches of a cult with the darkest of designs on her little boy, Ben, but the years have been anything but easy on the Cassidy family.
In early 2012, in the midst of a cold season of my own, I took a deep breath and immersed myself in Alison Littlewood's darkly fantastic first novel. In the review I wrote at the time, I concluded that it was "a powerful story about motherhood... about family, and the ties that bind us. Excepting a few missteps that it bears saying plague all and sundry authors in this genre [...] A Cold Season is a terrifically chilling tale. A sterling debut which bodes unspeakably well for its author and beyond."
By which I meant Jo Fletcher Books too: a brand new genre fiction-focussed imprint at the time. Now, nearly two years later, I'm pleased as can be to report that their forthcoming slate still looks great.
This week I was lucky enough to secure an early look at what's to come from JFB in 2014, and alongside The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord and Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald, The Unquiet House — Alison Littlewood's next novel — was one of the highlights of a packed catalogue.
Here's the cover art:
And a brief blurb about the book to boot:
Mire House is dreary, dark, cold and infested with midges. But when Emma Dean inherits it from a distant relation, she immediately feels a sense of belonging.
It isn’t long before Charlie Mitchell, grandson of the original owner, appears claiming that he wants to seek out his family. But Emma suspects he’s more interested in the house than his long-lost relations.
And when she starts seeing ghostly figures, Emma begins to wonder: is Charlie trying to scare her away, or are there darker secrets lurking in the corners of Mire House?
That I never got around to reviewing Littlewood's second novel is a real regret, but I did indeed read it, and Path of Needles did nothing to diminish my appreciation of an abominably promising new horror author. Safe to say I won't make the same mistake when The Unquiet House is released in the UK next March.
Cass is trying to rebuild her life after the loss of her soldier husband, and a renovated mill in the picture-perfect village of Darnshaw looks to be the idyllic spot to bring up her traumatised son, Ben.
But the locals aren't as friendly as Cass had hoped, and Ben is beginning to display a hostility she can't understand. Then the blizzards blow in, and Darnshaw is marooned in a sea of snow.
Now, threatened on all sides, Cass finds herself pitted against forces she can barely comprehend. The cold season has begun.
***
Can you imagine anything more awful than your own flesh and blood turning against you?
Cass can't. And she's been to hell and back already. Reeling from the horrible loss of her husband - the spoils of a cruel and unusual war - Cass wants nothing more than the chance to wipe the slate clean... to start afresh. So she goes back to square one; specifically to the little village where she and her father - a man of the cloth she's long since stopped talking to, for reasons that will become clear over the course of A Cold Season - spent the very beginning of her life. She takes an apartment in an old mill away from the main thoroughfare, recently renovated, and as yet eerily empty... excepting the rats that scratch at the walls when night falls.
But Darnshaw is different - disturbingly different - from the peaceful place Cass remembers. Or perhaps Darnshaw is as Darnshaw always was, and it is this suddenly single mother's memories that are at fault. In any case, Cass's young son Ben, at least, seems to be settling in nicely. He's made a few friends, and taken to sharing -- though exactly what he's been sharing, he won't say. Cass doesn't much approve of the crowd he's fallen in with, and soon she's having second thoughts about this move herself.
There's not a lot she can do about any of the above till the snow lets up, though. The weather has been relentlessly wintry since she and her son arrived: the phones are down, access to the internet with them, and all the roads in and out of Darnshaw are rendered inaccessible. It's almost as if the village has closed in around her...
A Cold Season is Yorkshire author Alison Littlewood's first novel, and one of the first books to bear the name of the new imprint publishing it; that is to say Jo Fletcher Books, fresh out of Quercus. It's a dark fantasy with dark designs on our hearts, and I dare say it sets a high watermark for both Alison Littlewood and the genre fiction division her impressive debut heralds. Cass and Ben are very well realised characters - as are the parents and teachers and pupils whose paths cross theirs - and the harrowing trials they are put through serve to bring us closer to them, even as mother and son are driven further and further apart. But the real scene-stealer, I think, is Darnshaw.
Per the stark cover art, and the flash of angry red left by Ben, running away again, Darnshaw is a village of vacuum black and icy white... a manifestly monochrome landscape broken only occasionally by "bright splashes of colour emerging from the dim light." (p.26) Usually, yes, they are red, recalling Don't Look Now and a hundred other scary stories, in film and in literature -- and indeed, in video games. In fact, from the impenetrable mist at the outset to the broken roads (see p.177) which prevent Cass and Ben's escape on through the creepy, culty church where the last act culminates, A Cold Season recalls one video game franchise in particular: Silent Hill, a favourite of mine.
Knowing homage or not, Littlewood does rather hammer these images home in the early-going, but cannily - once the scene is set - she leaves Darnshaw to take on a life of its own in our imaginations, and I assure you, it's a place you'll not soon forget.
That said, as is so often the way with narratives concerned with the dead spaces between the horizontal and the vertical, A Cold Season is at its best in the exquisitely deliberate beginning, when the unknown and the inexplicable are presented on their own terms, as opposed to being overburdened by the combined weight of expectation and explanation, as is the case come the sadly harried and somewhat preachy conclusion.
For the larger part, though, A Cold Season is a powerful story about motherhood... about family, and the ties that bind us. Excepting a few missteps that it bears saying plague all and sundry authors in this genre - not merely newcomers, and in any case Alison Littlewood is hardly an amateur - A Cold Season is a terrifically chilling tale. A sterling debut which bodes unspeakably well for its author and beyond.
Highly recommended seasonal reading, in short. And it is the season!
