By James Keen
“Everyone knows how this is going to end…” – “Snow blindness”.
Golden opens with atmosphere, deftly portraying the characters we will be following between two storms twelve years apart. While the pace of this horror novel is generally brisk, for many this may be a familiar genre novel that has been exploited countless times before. Golden opens with the town of Coventry in the early 21st century in the United States being hit by a particularly severe snowstorm that causes schools to close, electricity to go out, driving to become dangerous, and local police to worry about being unable to effectively guard against it. Of course, the events during this first major storm foreshadow another cold weather anomaly that will hit the town again more than a decade later. More than a few lives are lost in the initial frost disaster, and the consequences of these tragedies become the focus of the novel, so when another equally fierce storm is about to hit the town, it only adds to the public’s anxiety.
In the urban sprawl of Coventry, Golden offers a cast of protagonists who are cleverly and succinctly drawn, with a variety of personalities, from young to old, mild-mannered to depraved, all of which happen to tie into the novel’s key character, the once-rookie detective Joe Keenan, who is haunted by the events of the first freezing disaster and sees the second severe sub-zero disaster as a chance for some kind of redemption. While the character of Keenan is easily engaging, it is the character of young Doug Manning that is the most engaging and morally ambiguous character in the book. A down-on-his-luck man who perhaps never got a decent chance, just a reasonably good guy who is forced by circumstances to do things he wishes he didn’t have to do. Golden does a good job of developing the characters of each of the townspeople; their motivations aren’t overly undermined in any obvious way by the unshakable plot, as can sometimes happen with genre novels with multiple narrative viewpoints.
The protagonists are established, but what about the threats? The power of Dionysus is out to upend Apollonian society and its relatively benign nature. What does the tolerant reader get this time around? Vampires, werewolves, ghosts? A little bit of all of it, actually—a clever blend of well-worn genre demons, cloaked in an icy veneer, and armed with a myriad of supernatural abilities. They’re creative in the way they’re presented, and Golden does a great job of controlling them, just enough to avoid being annoyingly overexposed at first. The problem is, they unfortunately lose impact as the novel hurtles toward its frenetic conclusion, as the author errs on the side of spectacle, lessening the threat of “The Iceman” by depicting cartoonish and frankly silly action sequences.
About halfway through, the storyline becomes alternately interesting and dull for this reviewer. The characters, especially the aloud, onion ring-eating Detective Keenan, lose their appeal as they display police cliches you’ve seen in poorly scripted TV shows. Upon arriving at a crime scene and checking in with his subordinates, Keenan says lines like “Draw me a picture” and “What do we got?” The dialogue smacks of a lazy reliance on treating the characters as recognizable archetypes. There are more awkward set pieces as the book takes a figurative turn at the finish line with one character musing, “She realized they couldn’t predict the wishes of the dead,” and other witticisms like “Wake up detective. The impossible will kill you,” create a disconnect with the text that weakens the reader’s immersion in the narrative.
Filmmaker Joss Whedon once said, “One of the responsibilities of a storyteller is to figure out your The audience wants something and it never satisfies them.” This reviewer happens to agree with that sentiment (although it’s puzzling coming from Whedon, who, in this reviewer’s opinion, never really adopted his own philosophy outside of The Cabin in the Woods, but that’s another story… a bag of cheese). If you’re a Stephen King fan, then you’ll likely enjoy this work – apparently Golden’s first horror novel in over a decade – and you’ll get what you expect. However, for this reviewer, after an undeniably engrossing first half, the urge to leave Golden’s Coventry behind unfortunately became increasingly tempting.
Order yours here.
score:3/5
