A Winter Haunting

A winter haunting, however, is a pure ghost story, spooky and nail-biting. Luckily, I didnt start the book expecting it to be as good or as scary as Summer of Night which saved me some disappointment. Actually its not as much a sequel as a new idea spun off an old story, so it doesnt rehash or tread on familiar ground.

I did find the passages concerning Dales love affair to be a bit long-winded and non-essential to the plot. Also, the story itself could have been a little meatier. I enjoyed it, though, because even with these minor shortcomings, it is the first book in a long time Ive read that was truly unsettling.
I would recommend anyone who hasnt read Summer of Night to pick it up right away and enjoy A Winter Haunting as a nice companion piece.

Simmons also takes the standard genre elements and turns them on their collective head, all the while telling a good story that keeps you reading. "A Winter Haunting" is an admirable novel, and I cant imagine a more fitting continuation of its predecessor, "Summer of Night."

I re-read "Summer of Night" just prior to this book, to have the story fresh in my head. I dont think that its strictly necessary to read the older book to appreciate "A Winter Haunting," but I would have to say that knowing what happens in "Summer of Night" definitely adds several important perspectives to the events of the later book.

Dan Simmons has made a career out of writing excellent novels in multiple genres, and "Summer of Night" was no exception; one of the great modern horror novels. As in most such books, the story ends when the evil is defeated. "A Winter Haunting" reminds us that, in real life, the story never really ends there. Those who endure after suffering loss and trauma have to live with what has happened, have to deal with it as best they can.

Dale Stewart, in "A Winter Haunting," has dealt with the horrific events of his childhood by not dealing with them - by shutting them out, by refusing to even remember them. A writer now, as well as a college professor, Dale is also the survivor of a failed marriage and a failed affair with one of his students. The books he has written thus far are formulaic adventure stories. He is visiting the town where he grew up, living in the house of his friend who died in the summer of 1960, in order to try and gain something intangible that he feels he has lost, and to write a new sort of story about that long-lost summer that he cannot remember.

In returning to Elm Haven, the town where he grew up, Dale confronts a few of his old childhood fears as well as many of his new, "adult," ones. What is really interesting about this is that we come to see that many of the troubles he has suffered as an adult are at least partially a result of that terrible summer in 1960, which he has never faced and dealt with directly. In "A Winter Haunting" we get to see what most horror novels never show us: we see what happens to someone who confronts evil and lives to tell the tale. There are no pat conclusions or pithy observations in "A Winter Haunting" - just an implied truth that sometimes memories are too terrible to be relived, and that some stories take a long time to tell.

Though "A Winter Haunting" is a sequel to "Summer of Night," as I read it I got more of a feeling of remembrance from the book. It builds upon the events of the earlier story, but it also deviates from them quite dramatically in tone and theme. Its not a nostalgic novel at all. In fact, its almost anti-nostalgia. As Dale tries desperately hard to create memories of a summer he cant remember, even as he confronts new terrors both real and spiritual, we are led to the conclusion that some things simply cannot - or should not - be recalled with fondness.

In "A Winter Haunting" we are reminded that horrible events have consequences beyond the events themselves. They can exact a psychological toll that can take a lifetime or more to overcome. Once again Simmons has given me a pleasant surprise; not because he has written yet another fine novel (thats an expectation by now), but because he has explored original territory in the horror genre. And he has staked his claim well.