I'm really debating how to go about this review, since it's a case of enjoying a book, but finding faults with it all the same.
Christopher Golden is an engaging writer, and I've liked most of his stuff that I've read. The problem I keep running in to when I read his stuff is that alienation is a recurring and heavy theme. Unlike Brian Keane and his nihilistic writing, Golden's writing tend to read like My Chemical Romance in prose form. Seriously. It's not hard to picture his characters in a bad Lifetime movie about secret cutting.
Anyway, Snowblind Enjoins us in Coventry, Massachusetts, at the outset of a fairly major blizzard. We meet several characters, most of whom die. Including little Issac, who tells his brother Jake about the ice men dancing outside the window before being pulled through the window to his untimely death.
Cut to 12 years later as another blizzard starts coming in. And people who lost family 12 years ago get tense, and other people in their lives start acting very strange.
At which point the book becomes It crossed with The Returned. Because the folks who died 12 years ago are mostly possessing bodies of other people in town, hiding from the ice men. And of course, the dead are trying to tie up loose ends in the middle of a horror story.
It's readable, and fun, but most of the characters are one dimensional, entire personalities defined by who they lost 12 years ago and how they felt about that person.
I realize Golden wrote for comic books prior to his novel career, and it shows. The writing is very visual, but the characters remain mostly flat. All in all, worth getting from the library, although this isn't one I'd be inclined to buy.
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