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Snowblind

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Snowblind is a beautifully written thriller, as tense as it is terrifying – Jónasson is a writer with a big future’ Luca Veste The writing is crisp and economical, the gore is nicely realized, and the atmosphere is frighteningly realized. There's a dictum in writing that demands "show, don't just tell," and, in regards to the primary threat of Snowblind, McBride nails that here. Neither the readers nor the protagonists know quite what they're up against until fairly late in the book, which makes it all the scarier. We're in this together with these four friends, lost in the woods after a hunting mishap and finding refuge in an old, abandoned cabin, forced to fill in the blanks of what, exactly, is out there. McBride gives us a few hints before the big unveiling, which is a neat little twist. Snowblind is as atmospheric a murder mystery that you could find’ For Winter Nights – A Bookish Blog I'm tempted to say Snowblind is a traditional ghost story but it isn't really. The ghosts are fairly traditional but the situation and the event that creates them is a little different. It's different enough to put some real life in these ghosts (pun is definitely intentional) and epic enough for Christopher Golden to flesh out its cast of pretty much everyone in the small town of Coventry. It is a quieter type of supernatural horror novel with an emphasis on the psychological rather than blood and gore. Yet it has more than its share of action and surprises. The characters are written in such a way that they are realistic and relate-able (even if you only get to know a few of them really well). You find yourself rooting for them, even while thinking they could very well be your neighbors. You worried with them, you cheered with them.. hell you even cried with them. This book had everything!

The murder-in-a-small-town theme plays out a bit like an Agatha Christie novel ...a satisfying mystery where all the pieces, in the end, fall together.' DALLAS NEWS A classic whodunit with a vividly drawn protagonist and an intriguing, claustrophobic setting, Snowblind dazzles like sunlight on snow, chills like ice and confirms the growing influence of Scandinavian crime fiction." -Richmond Times-Dispatch Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. GALA Magazine‘s best novels of the autumn 2011: 1. Ein altes Haus am Hudson Rlver - Edith Wharton, 2. Alchemie der Nacht - Heike Koschyk, 3. Leichte Turbulenzen - Alexa Hennig von Lange, 4. Schneebraut – Ragnar Jonasson [SNOWBLIND], 5. Die Liebeshandlung - Jeffrey Eugenides, 6. IQ 84 - Haruki Murakami. I absolutely loved the ominous build up in the beginning of Snowblind. A blizzard is blowing in to a small town in New England, and something is waiting out in the snow. It reminded me of Stephen King's The Mist. You know some bad shit is happening, but you don't know exactly what is out there.Cocaine:]'s synthetic relatives are benzocaine and procaine, the latter marketed under the trade name Novocain." Once all of the foreboding came to a head and we started seeing the horrors of the blizzard, the timeline jumped ahead 12 years. The real story of Snowblind lies in what happened 12 years after the original events, but the jump in time forced the middle to lag for me. I spent most of Snowblind longing for the awesome that got left behind. A lone silhouette separated from the shadows. Large and hunched. Low to the ground. Was it a bear? He couldn’t....couldn’t quite tell. He tried to zero in on it through the scope- Another silhouette materialized from the woods to the right of the first...another to its left...”

It may be my fault for listening to this as an audiobook. I don’t know. People seem to love this book but for me I felt like I was playing a frustrating game of “Who was that again?” throughout most of the novel and I lost interest in the story and the characters as a result. Twelve years later the residents of Coventry have never fully recovered- feelings of guilt and loss still weigh heavily on the ones left behind. When the weather forecast calls for another super-storm- people become nervous and edgy, and when the snow starts falling- it becomes apparent that something evil came along with it....again.

Christie would go on to have the most influence on the budding author as he started reading her novels aged twelve. As a child he read her novels first in Icelandic before he transitioned into English and went on to become a translator. It is Agatha Christie’s strengths in setting and plotting that had some of the most profound influence on Ragnar Jonasson. This is almost a classic Scandinavian noir setup, but Ragnar Jónasson is full of surprises ... I loved it." Mystery Scene Magazine The small New England town of Coventry had weathered a thousand blizzards…but never one like this. Icy figures danced in the wind and gazed through children’s windows with soul-chilling eyes. People wandered into the whiteout and were never seen again. Families were torn apart, and the town would never be the same. Fast forward 12 years and another storm is approaching. People are understandably skittish (me too!) and as it turns out, with good reason… I was highly anticipating reading Snowblind this year. I've been a fan of Christopher Golden for a long time, and it has been a while since he's released a new horror book. When I heard Snowblind was going to be released, I immediately placed it on my must read list.

Only, ehh. I think the idea behind this one is better than the actual execution of it. I liked it, it was good, but not great. I never really connected with any of the characters and I felt that there was just too much non-horror filler for my tastes. I get that Golden was trying to show us Small Town America, and get us to be horrified at the prospect of these nice (and some not so nice) people being murdered by swirling snow creatures, but the build up was so long that rather than creating a sense of "Oh no! I really hope nothing happens to this character!" I experienced more of an "Is nothing happening at all?" feeling for most of the middle of the book. The action bookends this dull middle section that gives a lot of character details, but still doesn't really work to make me care all that much about them. The sun was on the horizon and all seven were bobbing in the surf when in the distance an intruder appeared. A jogger. He approached, moving at an even pace along the waterline, his face flushed, his breathing steady, his body drenched with sweat and glory, radiating that all-American, infinite faith in the cardiovascular benefits of discomfort." friends Coburn, Baumann, Shore and Vigil are once again embarking on their yearly elk hunting expedition to the aptly named and snowbound Mt Isolation. They are forced to seek refuge when Vigil suffers severe trauma and injury in a fall and are now along surrounded by the harsh elements of nature and something evil and unknown....the scene is set! “Someone or something was still out there. Watching them. Waiting”...ESCHBORNER STADTMAGAZIN / “A wonderful work to get to know the guest country of the bookfair, Iceland.” – Eschborner Stadtmagazin on SNOWBLIND Ragnar Jónasson is a new name in the crime writing genre and I urge anyone who is a fan of Nordic crime noir to rush out and get yourself a copy of Snowblind this you will want to add to your collection. It is really that good ... a tense, gripping novel’ The Last Word You'd expect a book about cocaine to be, if nothing else, exciting, and Snowblind is, occasionally, very exciting, but it's also a bitch to read. This was first published in 1976 and has not dated particularly well. The main reason why, and the book's biggest flaw, in my opinion, is the author's unabashed enthusiasm for the story (not the drug or the business) though it has to be said, an enthusiasm that is considerably more restraint than Howard Mark's excruciating introduction.

Ragnar Jonasson is an Icelandic writer of crime fiction, the most popular of which was the “Dark Iceland” series of novels that featured Detective Ari Thor. Jonasson was born in Reykjavik the capital of Iceland, where he has lived and worked for most of his life.I received this book free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. This is subtle..Christopher Golden proves here that the best creepy stories do not need out and out gore blood and guts, the best ones are the ones where its the atmosphere that gets you, and where the characters are realistic people that you can root for even as unrealistic things are happening to them. It did genuinely make me shiver now and then (creepy, misbehaving children will do that to me every time!) and it is an imaginative and disturbing tale.

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