It's 2AM, the fear is gone

So, I just finished reading Christopher Golden's new novel, Dead Ringers.  Which was....interesting.

We actually have a prologue to start, in which a man named Frank Lindburgh reflects on his horrible like, slowing drowning in booze much like his father did. He's lost his job as a reporter, with internet killing off print journalism. We hear of his downward spiral, and endure quite a bit of his backstory until he hears a noise in his kitchen. Going to investigate, he finds a man wearing his face who promptly beats the stuffing out of him.

From there, we center on Tess Devlin, who's introduced as she starts cussing out a man who looks exactly like her ex-husband Nick. Problem being Nick's in New Hampshire with his new girlfriend, not in Boston being verbally assaulted by his ex. Tess's best friend, Lili, goes to an art gallery, only to be mistaken for the featured artist. Frank, as it turns out, has been handcuffed to a post in his basement while his double goes out and leads a better life than anything Frank's accomplished in recent memory. And then there's Audrey, the married lesbian psychic who's wife is pregnant. Audrey's first encounter with the strangeness involves a run down to the beach and being assaulted by a filthy man dressed in rags and a look like Oedipus at the end of Oedipus Rex.

As the week passes in book time, we begin to get glimpses of what links all these characters, why there's a Psychomanteum in a fancy hotel restaurant, And the very real existential question of who is the real person.


The book has some genuinely creepy moments, like Tess's first encounter with her double, which happens when Tess wakes up in the middle of the night to her double standing over her bed and Tess's double pretending to be Tess's daughter's mother. Also, when we see what the Raggedy Man is actually doing, it's a terror inducing moment.

Unfortunately, when we get the real picture on what's been happening about 2/3 of the way through the book (which most readers will have figured out a few chapters earlier), the reveal plays out like the end of a Scooby Doo episode. I fully expected the revelation to end with "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids and your dog!"

At its best, which thankfully is the majority of the book, it's a bit like reading a Twilight Zone episode. (Specifically "Shatterday" from the 80's reboot, which wiki says was based on a Harlan Ellis story.)  At its worst, you can hear the canned laughter and incidental music in the background.

The cold never bothered me anyway....

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.