Cold Snap by Lindy Ryan

I can see what Lindy Ryan was trying to do here, given my steeping in world mythology, but I think it needed a little more explaining so that the average reader can figure out what’s actually going on in this horror novella of guilt and grief.

Just a few weeks ago, Derek Sinclaire died, falling off of the roof while putting up Christmas lights. His wife Christine has been guilt-stricken ever since: at her inability to save him, at her insistence on getting the lights up so soon, at all the things that aren’t her fault but that she blames herself for anyway. She feels like her fifteen year-old son Billy would much rather that she had been the one to die, as that’s pretty much what she feels, too.

Unable to take the suffocating sympathy of her neighbors any longer, she packs up Billy and their cat Haiku and takes them up to the mountains where Derek had made reservations for them to have a Christmas getaway out in the snowy wilds. The lady at check-in is kind of a bitch, but does warn Christine to look out for moose. She also tells her where to find the Wi-fi information, which Christine immediately palms in a futile effort to get her kid to talk to her instead of staying glued to his phone the entire trip. Still addled by grief, Christine finds that she packed over-well in some cases and poorly in others. And that’s before the lights start shattering in their remote mountain cabin and a strange horned figure begins to lurk outside.

Sort of a cross between Stephen King’s The Shining and Cujo — both of which are rather hilariously name-checked in this book — Cold Snap explores the nightmare territory of grief, underpinning it with the strange remoteness of being snowed in with wild creatures but, crucially, neglecting to discuss what a Horned God might symbolize. Whether you’re discussing figures drawn from Europe’s Cernunnos or Northern America’s Pamola, it’s helpful to ground the adversary of your piece in context so that it’s not just the story of a woman having a nervous breakdown while being hunted by a potentially rabid moose. So while I could easily enough track Christine’s primal longing for the resurrection of her husband even as her civilized self runs from the idea, lay readers will probably spend a lot of time scratching their heads and going “huh?” because, to very liberally paraphrase Christine herself, this book does kinda feel like a coked-out “animals gone wild!” story a la Cujo (it’s not, btw.)

Cold Snap is not at all a bad novella, but a little more scene-setting would have really enhanced the overall quality. If you’re a mythology nerd like me — or if you just like horror stories for atmosphere and indelible scenes instead of reasonable explanations — then this is a great addition to your reading list as the weather darkens and the world grows cold.

Cold Snap by Lindy Ryan was published October 15 2024 by Titan Books and is available from all good booksellers, including