Hard pass on winter horror
At tor.com: 5 Books About the Horror of Winter
This is the season for horror. By the end of a book or movie the crisis will be over in some way, and the danger will have passed: this applies, of course, to much fiction, but when the stakes are at their highest, the catharsis is all the more wonderful. As GK Chesterton wrote, ‘Fairy tales don’t tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.’ And winter horror reminds you that spring will come.
While this is a fine reason to read horror, I guess, let us pause to examine the last book listed in the linked post:
This opens with gut-wrenching scenes as Simon, by his own admission a loser, pays a strange man to guide him through closed caves in Wales so he can take photos, for his website, of the bodies of earlier adventurers who died down there. When Simon is the only one to make it out alive he becomes notorious and needs to do something even bigger to capitalize on his fame. Off he goes to Mount Everest, ‘the highest graveyard in the world’, lying about his climbing experience to get him to a place where he can film the corpses on the mountainside.…
Ugh! This might turn into a horror novel, but right now it sounds like a character study of a terrible person. From this description, I’m totally on board with this guy meeting a grisly end! I wonder if that is quite the effect the author is going for.
Should you want to try this book, for some reason, I notice it’s only $1.99 on Amazon right now. Definitely not one I’ll be looking at, though, not this winter, but probably also not any winter.
Instead of stories where winter is a season that leads to horror, this year I definitely prefer stories where winter is, though perhaps dangerous, also glorious.
1.Mapping Winter by Marta Randall, the winter-themed story I am most pleased the author wrote and released.
2. Winter’s Tale by Helprin, which does the glory of winter better than any other book ever written
3. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
4. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
New cover for that one:
I don’t quite get what these circles are supposed to represent. But I never liked the original cover, so, well, meaningless circles are all right with me, I guess. Can anybody suggest what they are supposed to be, though?
5. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
6. The Snow Queen by Joan Vinge
7. Cloud’s Rider by CJC
8. Anvil of Ice by Scott Michael Rohan
9. The Ice Dragon by GRR Martin
10. And, of course, Tuyo
If you’ve got a favorite winter-themed story — particularly one where winter is not presented as something to endure, or not only something to endure, but as as beautiful and/or glorious — by all means, drop it in the comments.
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