week of 3/20/02
 
 
 

‘Haunting’ solidifies Simmons’ reputation
By Eric S. Brown
A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons.
William Morrow & Co., 2002.
$18.95 — 320 pp.By Eric S. Brown

Dan Simmons is perhaps one of the best writers in America today. His very first novel, The Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award and his novel Hyperion won the Hugo award. The whole Hyperion series are considered to be among the best sci-fi novels ever written and can be found on the shelves of any bookstore worthy of the name.

Carrion Comfort, another of his novels, won the Bram Stoker award for horror fiction and his books — Darwin’s Blade and The Crook Factory — have received much critical praise all across the country. When Darwin’s Blade was released last year, Gary Carden even gave it a good review in the SMN. Dan Simmons may not be as well known as Stephen King, Clive Barker, or Robert McCammon, but he will likely be one the writers remembered from our time.

Stephen King once said, “I am in awe of Dan Simmons ... [He] writes like a hot-rodding angel.” Simmons prose is always smooth, fast paced, and extremely moving. Simmons’ new novel, A Winter Haunting, demonstrates these talents.

A Winter Haunting is actually a bizarre cross between a prequel and a sequel to his earlier novel, Summer of Night, about a band of boys who form a bicycle gang to confront a horrible and powerful supernatural evil which threatens to engulf their small town during the summer of 1960. The boys are able to stop the evil and banish it from this world, but at a terrible price. One of the boys, Duane, dies in the battle. His lifelong dream of being a writer (and even just growing up) are stolen from him at the age of 11. His friend, Dale Stewart, one of the key characters in Summer of Night, swears at the end of the novel to live Duane’s dream for them both.

As A Winter Haunting opens, Dale is returning to Elm Haven after a lifetime away. He has become a very successful novelist and a respected professor, but his life is in shambles. The dark and repressed memories of the summer so long ago have torn his life to shreds costing him his marriage and even his affair. Dale has sunk into a deep depression and suffers from hellish nightmares which he can’t explain. Dale decides to take his own life, but fate spares him and he leaves his job at the college and all of his new life behind to go home to Elm Haven and write a novel of his childhood there to purge the demons of depression from his soul.

Dale takes up residence in Duane’s father’s old house and sets to work on his novel, but strange things begin to happen. He encounters Hellhounds, ghosts with romantic intentions, e-mails from a long dead friend, and the lingering evil of the old school he and the bicycle gang destroyed years before.

But these are not Dale’s only problems. A local group of Elm Haven “Skinheads” are after Dale for a series of Internet articles he wrote early in his career bashing their beliefs, and the sheriff just doesn’t seem to care. Alone and lost, Dale also must struggle with his own mind and his wish to die.

By the end of A Winter Haunting, the reader is left feeling as if he has taken a fun and joyous ride into Hell itself and wrestled with the terrible unstable depths of the human soul. There is a complete sense of resolution which ties up all the loose ends of both books, but perhaps not the one a reader would expect. That surprise will further enhance the readers’ opinion of Simmons.

Be warned, however, that A Winter Haunting is a much deeper and psychological tale than Summer of Night, but no less of an enjoyable read. The supernatural forces of Summer of Night are still present but are downplayed in comparison to Dale’s internal dilemmas. That said, I would highly recommend A Winter Haunting to any fan of dark fiction, but one must read Summer of Night first or he will discover only a pale shadow of the enjoyment and wonder that I found within its pages.

(Eric S. Brown is a copy editor for the SMN, assistant editor of the Swamp, and a short story writer.)