Book review: Snow Blind

I really should try to remember, when I'm browsing books at various times of the year, that I like to have a ghost story (or collection of them) to read over Christmas. As it happens this year I already had one waiting on my Kindle so Christopher Golden's Snow Blind it was. The novel proved just right for the job, not exactly a traditional ghost story but with just about the right balance of darkness and hope.

It's set in a New England town that's used to snowstorms every winter but two, twelve years apart, prove particularly deadly. The first few chapters take place during the first storm, which claims a couple of dozen lives. Most of the book takes place twelve years later though, when the approaching second storm also brings with it some of the people who died in the first. There's a traditional ghost but most of them possess the body of someone living, with a warning that the storm contains an evil supernatural force, the real reason for the high casualty rate.

I thought the book nicely set up the various groups of characters, each of whom loses someone in the first storm only to have them come back in the second, with not all the returnees necessarily being welcome visitors. So there's plenty of people to feel invested in as they try to stay safe from the ice creatures, and maybe even save their loved ones' ghosts from their limbo state.

Book review: King of Hell

The seventh book in Christopher Golden's "Shadow Saga" series is also the final one; of course the third book was meant to be the last one as well and Peter Octavian still came back so you never know. After a sixth volume that didn't do much for me this conclusion is a lot better, as Peter travels across dimensions to free the friends who got trapped in Hell in previous installments, and in the process finds out who the titular King of Hell is.

Golden's been writing fantasy and horror novels for decades, and the twist here is that he uses the conceit of multiple universes to mix together every other novel or series he's ever created, each having taken place in a different dimension that Octavian and his newest companions go through. A couple of them become quite central to the plot, like characters from Soulless, his zombie uprising novel from a few years ago, and there's major players from one of his series that I haven't read, the "Menagerie" books; while others are more fleeting, like a tongue-in-cheek reference to his early novel Strangewood. It probably doesn't matter if you don't know any of the other series, although this being the last in the Shadow Saga it'd be a bit silly to read it without having read the previous six. I enjoyed this one more than the last couple but I think it's probably the right time to leave this particular universe be.

Book review: The Graves of Saints

The Graves of Saints is another of Christopher Golden's Shadow Saga novels, a series that started out as a trilogy but got revived and extended into an indefinite sequence. It's always felt more like a publisher's request than a story Golden was desperate to tell, especially as this vampire saga was revived just as the latest craze for them was at its peak. And although there's been some entertaining books in the series this one really fell flat for me. This time there's the leader of an old-school vampire coven who takes a personal vendetta out on the series' lead, Peter Octavian, as well as a number of demonic incursions around the world, the graves of decapitated saints becoming portals from hell dimensions. But the book took me weeks to get through because the story steadfastly refuses to get started until at least 70% of the way in. Much of it is about Octavian dealing with a personal grief and failing to spring into action, which makes for about as dynamic a story as it sounds. This book is pretty obvious setup for the next in the series, and seems to be partly about establishing a new breed of supernatural creatures to populate upcoming volumes, but on its own terms it's pretty disappointing.

Book review: Waking Nightmares

Waking Nightmares is the fifth in Christopher Golden's Shadow Saga series of books, that follows a post-Church world where the measures put into place to keep the supernatural at bay have been lost, and alternate dimensions now regularly creep into this one.

This time around the magician Peter Octavian is called upon to deal with an ancient chaos goddess who's been reawakened in an small college town, with the help of three women, a witch, a vampire, and a seemingly normal human with a family connection to the events. This is another fun supernatural thriller although it's very obvious The Shadow Saga is now something completely different than it originally was - the first three books were a separate trilogy with an ongoing epic sweep and huge cast of characters, but from the fourth book on it's been practically a reboot into a series of standalone adventures. Still good, but not quite what it was when I started reading the series.

Book review: Soulless

It's a while since I read anything by US fantasy/horror author Christopher Golden, I've just been ploughing through what's on my kindle, but clearing out the flat I dug out his zombie novel Soulless, which I hadn't got round to reading yet. A daytime TV show's stunt of hosting a live séance goes wrong when the three psychics and two hosts all end up bonded together in a coma. The supernatural channel they open uses the broadcast to spread throughout New York State, which is overrun by the risen dead. It's a pretty standard zombie story with the usual disparate group getting together to fight off the monsters, with the additional focus of them trying to get to the TV studio to stop the invasion's origin point. There's not a lot of surprises and the morality of the climactic events is kind of dubious. But I did like Golden's attempts to rationalise the standard zombie tropes like the flesh-eating and the fact that their heads need to be destroyed to stop them.