This is a direct sequel to Simmon's superior Summer of Night. The first novel was a celebration of childhood against a backdrop of horror in which a group of children in a small Illinois town, in the year 1960, battle an ancient evil. Forty years later one of the characters, Dale Stewart, returns to the town after a long and successful career as a writer and teacher has come unglued. The town, like Dale's personal life is falling into ruin.

Dale is haunted by the depression, a failed suicide, and the memory of the mistakes he made. He is also haunted by actual ghosts. This is the sort of pyschological novel in which it is often difficuot to tell where Dale's personal troubles end and the supernatural begins, though clues are given that not all of the strange events are just in Dale's mind.

Thematically this novel is far removed from Summer of Night. Both are aptly named after a season- one being about children in the summer of life, the other about a middle-age man suffering a personal winter. It also attempts to be more "literary" with a reference to a Henry James story, "the Jolly Corner." In the James story a protagonist encounters a ghost of the he might have been under other circumstances. In this novel we encounter the ghost of a writer who might have been, Duane McBride, whose death in the first novel inspired Dale Stewart to become a writer in his place. My feeling is that this literary effort was to Simmons' detriment, since the free play of his imagination in the first novel created a more compelling experience.

A playful note at the end is a suggestion that this might actually be a prequel of sorts for the first novel, being perhaps the events that lead to it being written.