Twelve years ago, the small town of Coventry, Massachusetts was in the grasp of a particularly brutal winter. And then came the Great Storm.
It hit hard. Not everyone saw the spring. Today the families, friends and lovers of the victims are still haunted by the ghosts of those they lost so suddenly. If only they could see them one more time, hold them close, tell them they love them.
It hit hard. Not everyone saw the spring. Today the families, friends and lovers of the victims are still haunted by the ghosts of those they lost so suddenly. If only they could see them one more time, hold them close, tell them they love them.
It was the deadliest winter in living memory... until now.
When a new storm strikes, it doesn't just bring snow and ice, it brings the people of Coventry exactly what they've been wishing for. And the realisation their nightmare is only beginning.
***
Winter is upon us, and with it, inklings of Christmas.
There is no finer time, I find, for families and friends to get together, to share warmth and wine — mulled or otherwise — over stories of sleds and snowmen... all while a blanket of white settles softly upon the trees and streets outside.
But we all know that winter can be wicked as well; a season as cruel as it is cold. At its worst, winter, and the nightmarish things it brings, can kill. And in Snowblind by Christopher Golden, it does... or indeed they do.
"They were like wraiths, jagged, frozen bogeymen, and they whirled about on crushing gusts of wind." (pp.280-281) In the promising prologue of Golden's new novel — a prolonged piece set some years before the bulk of the book — these obscene creatures take eighteen souls young and old: a tragedy that tears apart the small Massachusetts community of Coventry.
A decade and change later, the survivors still struggle. And not just because they are haunted by hellish memories of that dark and stormy night:
There is no finer time, I find, for families and friends to get together, to share warmth and wine — mulled or otherwise — over stories of sleds and snowmen... all while a blanket of white settles softly upon the trees and streets outside.
But we all know that winter can be wicked as well; a season as cruel as it is cold. At its worst, winter, and the nightmarish things it brings, can kill. And in Snowblind by Christopher Golden, it does... or indeed they do.
"They were like wraiths, jagged, frozen bogeymen, and they whirled about on crushing gusts of wind." (pp.280-281) In the promising prologue of Golden's new novel — a prolonged piece set some years before the bulk of the book — these obscene creatures take eighteen souls young and old: a tragedy that tears apart the small Massachusetts community of Coventry.
A decade and change later, the survivors still struggle. And not just because they are haunted by hellish memories of that dark and stormy night:
Everything in Coventry — hell, the whole country — had gone downhill. The talking heads on TV said the economy was improving, but most of the guys he knew were still scared shitless that their jobs might evaporate out from underneath them. Either that or they were already unemployed.
Doug himself was just barely hanging on. (p.55)