A Winter Haunting

From Publishers Weekly The old saw "You can't go home again" is a chilling understatement for this highly effective supernatural shocker, Simmons's first horror novel since Fires of Eden (1994) and a sequel to Summer of Night (1991). The latter was an eerie chronicle of a summer of lost innocence for a group of preadolescent chums who confront an entity of irrepressible evil in rural Elm Haven, Ill. Four decades later Dale Stewart, a survivor of that summer, has returned to endure a winter of adult discontent: his wife has left him, his sideline career as a novelist is sputtering and a disastrous love affair has driven him to attempt suicide. Medicated to the gills for depression, Dale seeks inspiration for his next novel in a house that figured in events of the summer of 1960. But remnants of the old malign influence have survived and they manifest as vicious spectral dogs, threatening neo-Nazi punks, cryptic messages that appear magically on his computer screen and delusions that suggest he's losing his mind. Simmons orchestrates his story's weird events craftily, introducing them as unremarkable details that only gradually show their dark side. In a nod to Henry James, whose psychological ghost story "The Jolly Corner" is repeatedly invoked, he blends jaw-dropping revelations of spiritual intrusion with carefully manipulated challenges to the reader's confidence in Dale's faculties and motivations. Though it features its share of palpable things that go bump in the night, this novel is most unsettling in its portrait of personal demons of despair that imperceptibly empower them. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal Adult/High School-"Forty-one years after I died, my friend Dale returned to the farm where I was murdered. It was a very bad winter." What follows proves to be just as spooky as this opening suggests. Dale Stewart suffered a traumatic summer in 1960 when he was 11. His friend Duane McBride was mysteriously killed by a runaway piece of farm equipment. That story is told in Simmons's Summer of Night (Warner, 1992). Now, Dale, who is a professor and author of mountain-man adventure stories, is not doing well. He left his wife and family during a love affair with a graduate student who has since left him. He survived a suicide attempt and is being counseled for severe depression. Against his doctor's advice, he travels to his boyhood hometown in Illinois to spend his winter sabbatical in the now-empty home of his deceased friend. Even inattentive readers will spot the signs that Dale is in the midst of a horror story: the second floor of the farmhouse is sealed off with layers of plastic, yet a light glows at night as if someone were in there; he is repeatedly threatened by a group of dangerous skinheads; and a dog that appears to increase in size stalks him. And plenty of other spine-tingling events occur. Whether it's just horror fiction or Dale is actually insane hardly matters. It's good spooky fun that teens will love-but may not want to read when alone, at night, during a storm etc. Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal It looks as if Simmons is about to become really big: Darwin's Blade made the Los Angeles Times best sellers list, and both The Crook Factory and Children of Night have been optioned for film. In this novel, which reintroduces characters we met as children in Summer of Night, Dale Stewart returns to his childhood home to recoup after a disastrous love affair but gets caught up in a long-unresolved murder. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Simmons brings back characters from Summer of Night (1991), despite which this book stands quite well on its own, requiring no knowledge of earlier events. It begins innocently enough, for a horror story, with the narrator declaring, "Forty-one years after I died, my friend Dale returned to the farm where I was murdered." This murder isn't the story. The story is that of Dale, our ostensible hero, who has divorced his wife, ended an extraordinary affair, and is suffering at work. He returns to southern Illinois on a sabbatical to write a novel in his murdered best friend's house. Scattered flashbacks fill in most of the backstory, primarily from the beginning of Dale's affair onward but including some of Dale's childhood. Old associations and new trouble with local skinheads pick away at Dale's sense of reality, which is none too stable to begin with. Simmons' writing is tight and delirious, spinning an engrossing spiral of madness and fear, and the titular haunting is a beauty, supported by an exquisite selection of classical references. Regina Schroeder Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Dan Simmons is the Hugo Award-winning author of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion , and their sequels, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion . He has written the critically acclaimed suspense novels Darwin's Blade and The Crook Factory , as well as other highly respected works, including Summer of Night and its sequel A Winter Haunting, Song of Kali, Carrion Comfort, and Worlds Enough & Time . Simmons makes his home in Colorado. Read more