#Spooktober ‘A Winter Haunting’ by Dan Simmons

About the book…

A once-respected college professor and novelist, Dale Stewart has sabotaged his career and his marriage — and now darkness is closing in on him. In the last hours of Halloween he has returned to the dying town of Elm Haven, his boyhood home, where he hopes to find peace in isolation.

But moving into a long-deserted farmhouse on the far outskirts of town — the one-time residence of a strange and brilliant friend who lost his young life in a grisly “accident” back in the terrible summer of 1960 — is only the latest in his long succession of recent mistakes.

Because Dale is not alone here. He has been followed to this house of shadows by private demons who are now twisting his reality into horrifying new forms. And a thick, blanketing early snow is starting to fall …

‘A Winter Haunting’ by Dan Simmons was first published in 2002 and is a sequel to his previous bestseller, ‘Summer Of Night’

You don’t have to have read ‘Summer Of Night’ first, but personally, I found  myself enjoying ‘ A Winter Haunting‘ more because I had a background notion of what the characters had been through in the summer of 1960, when Dale’s boyhood friend, and child genius, Duane McBride died a horrendous death.

Having effectively set fire to his life and gone rogue to the wilds of Elm Haven, moving into the farm Duane had grown up in, rented from a realtor who he had gone to school with.

The basement was exactly how he had remembered, Duane’s safe place from the drunken spates his father used to have, the only change is the thick plastic sheeting which bars anyone from going upstairs , ostensibly because of the outrageous heating bills, but who knows what lies beyond it?

Dale’s wife and children, his reputation as a scholar and a writer were all left behind him, his plan is to throw himself into his writing , and to create a story that brings back the way he felt that year, before everything went to hell.

Except there is the fact that his phone won’t work, he has no internet connection, and yet…his laptop keeps sending him messages on his D.O.S , written in old English and Old Germanic . There is a black dog which is hanging around the farm and it is quite clearly meaning him harm. There are noises of footsteps above him, strange occurences which he cannot explain, and in his mind, he keeps turning back to the affair he had with Clare Two hearts, his grad student lover.

Alternating between Dale, and Duane, who is watching Dale half amused, half annoyed, from a world other than this one. He used to call his home ‘The Jolly Corner’ after the story by Henry James, which features a man who is haunted by the version of him that does not exist because he stayed in one place, when he had the choice to go. A Jekyll and Hyde-esque tale, it looms large over Dale as he contemplates his life, and just where it all went wrong.

The town of Elmhaven is analogous of the wreck of Dale’s life, he has returned home to the place where he was once happy, hoping to capture something, anything, to feel again. But he finds the town run down, and a victim of the passage of years, 40 of them to be precise, and the tarnish of his memories is just not enough to brighten the dulled trims, closed down shops and overwhelming ennui.

It is rare that you have a main character who you actually wish had been more a more accurate shot when he tried to take his own life, he seems eternally mournful and blaming everyone, and everything for what has happened to him. He is racist, sexist, homophobic, and has no problem taking up with a grad student who is half his age because of the connection he feels when they are together makes him feel valued. She is a conduit, not seen as a whole, and to be fair, her being about to embark to Princeton could not happen soon enough.

But I have read pretty much all of Simmons work, and so I trusted him and went with it, and am so glad that I did. It is a deeply disturbing and harrowing read of a man , looking for redemption and a reason to live who maybe deserves neither.

Who or what is haunting Dale is very hard to work out, is it his life untaken? The way he has treated the ones who loved him? Is it the people who never left the town, the school bully who is now the sheriff, the girl who was the object of his affection and lust, now a full grown woman? Is it Duane, who had so much promise but lived only 11 years?

As Dale looks back over the century which has contained his entire 51 years of life, he has reached a crossroads of life and death, do or, literally die. His haunting is a terrible and vengeful thing, and it is up to the reader which bit of it they find so horrific.

This book is available as an audiobook on Audible UK as part of their Plus catalogue , read by Bronson Pinchot with style, panache and flair. I loved it.

About the author…

Dan Simmons grew up in various cities and small towns in the Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which was the source of his fictional “Elm Haven” in 1991’s SUMMER OF NIGHT and 2002’s A WINTER HAUNTING. Dan received a B.A. in English from Wabash College in 1970, winning a national Phi Beta Kappa Award during his senior year for excellence in fiction, journalism and art.

Dan received his Masters in Education from Washington University in St. Louis in 1971. He then worked in elementary education for 18 years—2 years in Missouri, 2 years in Buffalo, New York—one year as a specially trained BOCES “resource teacher” and another as a sixth-grade teacher—and 14 years in Colorado.

Links-http://www.dansimmons.com/