Joe here with a new review!
I know it’s been a while since mine, or Amy's, last review, but we’ve been super busy. Amy’s had just started Uni and I’ve been dealing with personal problems and I’ve been working practically every day (not that I’m complaining, 9 – 5:30 surrounded by books… :D)
But enough excuses!
Today I am going to review ‘Snow Blind’ by Christopher Golden.
Here’s a segment of the blurb to get you intrigued:
The small New England town of Coventry had weathered a thousand blizzards...but never one like this. Icy figures danced in the wind and gazed through children's windows with soul-chilling eyes. People wandered into the whiteout and were never seen again. Families were torn apart, and the town would never be the same.
As old ghosts trickle back, this new storm will prove to be even more terrifying than the last.
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I received my copy of this book after requesting it from Bookbridgr and made a pact with myself to read it through Halloween, as it was labelled as a ‘Horror’ book.
I am honestly a little bit ‘meh’ about this book, as it was such a great story, the content was awesome, the characters were good, the plot was super; But from around Chapter 15, everything but the plot started to drag a little bit.
As I said, the characters were good, but they started to become unravelled as the book went on, I didn’t feel a lot of personal development had gone into them; I understand that Golden wanted to create this immersion of a small town and everybody knowing everybody, but somehow it didn’t fully work.
A few characters, such as Jake or Detective Kennan had really good development and they had grown from the past backstory.
Others such as Doug or Miri just seemed to be completely new people; they seemed to have ‘Changed’ almost entirely, which just didn’t seem to be believable.
The bit that made me almost cringe, mostly go “why?” was when we found out that Angela lived in the same town as Miri, and that Doug was with her.
I thought from the start, that Angela lived in another part of the country… obviously I was wrong.
I did enjoy the plot though; I haven’t read anything to do with blizzards containing ghosts so it was pretty original, but I really believed it should have been labelled something other than ‘Horror’, the main reason being there weren’t many horror elements.
Yes, it was creep at points, but a story just being creepy doesn’t make it automatically Horror, it needs suspense, some sort of humour, a dark twist of some kind and spooks*.
This story had practically no suspense or dark twist. Just light humour and a few spooks*.
I felt as if the writer had become so enthralled with an awesome idea of having these strange entities using the blizzard as their transportation, that he practically forgot to discuss and divulge into the realms of ‘What are they?’ ‘Why are they in a blizzard’?
He did try to shine a light on it by having on the of the characters saying “I do not know who they are or where they came from, maybe they are old gods that the people who lived on this land many year ago worshipped”
That, honestly, just doesn’t cut it. If these ‘Ice Men’ were some reminiscent ‘Old Gods’ then why wasn’t there any backstory towards them? Why create these creatures without giving them some sort of development?
All Horror books do it, from Dracula to Frankenstein, Horns to The Strain; Horror books give the creatures, be this ghouls, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, goat-men, vampires, etc back-stories or at the very least beginnings.
This book though, just seemed to have the ‘Ice Men’ flow along as if we already knew what they are or what they were…
(Update on the Horror situation. I work in Waterstones, where we use a system, which tells us what section a specific book is in; this book comes up under Horror, as it does on Bookbridgr.
But the actual title ON THE BOOK is Fiction. I know Fiction can cover Horror, Crime, Thrillers, etc. But it really should have gone into the Fiction section… not the Horror one)
In its entirety, the whole book was okay ☺
I did enjoy reading it, even if my whole review was mostly based on the negatives.
I mostly enjoyed the winter-y feel to it; I wish I had been able to read it whilst a snowstorm was occurring outside. I live in England so snowstorms are a rare occurrence… but I feel that a real-life snowstorm would have given this book more edge.
If you read this review and thought “Psh, doesn’t know what he’s talking about”
Then click here to buy the book and give it a go:
http://www.bookdepository.com/Snowblind-Christopher-Golden/9781472209580/?a_aid=BookolioBlog
Thank you for reading this review, I hope you enjoyed it and I am sorry it’s taken so long for us to do a new one, but don’t worry I am reading like crazy now!
Joe ☺
Spooks* = I don’t mean ghosts and ghouls, I mean things that are able to make your terrified or frightened, I wanted to have a scary effect cross over from book to real-life. It didn’t happen unfortunately.
PS: Thank you for reading my Mental Health Awareness Week post, it does mean so much to me that you guys read it and, hopefully, enjoyed it and took something from it.
I really hope it helped. ☺
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