Snow by Ronald Malfi

It’s always great to come across a new monster, one that makes you afraid of the familiar. Such as the dark or museums or black lagoons. In Malfi’s Snow, the monsters take that most beautiful of sights—lightly falling snow—and turns it into a nightmare.

Looking at the cover and reading the description, you might think it’s a book about creatures who take advantage of heavy snowfalls like blizzards and storms to stalk their prey. But you’d be wrong (it’s okay, it happens to me a lot). In Snow, the monsters are just that: the snow. And it doesn’t matter if it’s stormy snow or winter wonderland snow, they’re going to cut you open and climb inside, and walk you around like Krang.

Unfortunately, the story Malfi tells is all too familiar: stranded traveler in a strange town holes up with an unlikely gang of survivors and systematically gets them all killed. That’s right, look at that trope: Our heroes inevitably get a whole lot of people killed in their attempts at escape or rally support. But I digress.

With Snow, we see our hero, Todd Curry, trying desperately to get a flight out of O’Hare to visit his son and ex-wife for Christmas. Todd has a checkered past, with his gambling a driving force for his wife to leave him and take his son. But, he’s changed now and he’s ready to make amends. He’s so desperate, in fact, to see his son that he decides to drive from Chicago to Des Moines in a snow storm. At night. With strangers.

Without giving the entire plot away, I will say that he meets up with foes both human and not, and does his best to survive. He does a lot to keep other people safe, but in the end, he also gets a few people killed (not directly, but indirectly—like those kids that were doing just fine by themselves in a church until they rescued him and his female cohort).

Malfi is a great popular fiction writer. He doesn’t introduce any new ideas or fresh characters, but he takes what he knows and weaves a great little story. It’s a quick, read, too. Some of that has to do with page count, but I really feel it was Malfi’s writing. He drops us smack dab in the middle of the action in an arguably pointless prologue (we get the backstory again later), before he pulls back to introduce a few characters, and then drops us back in and never lets up. There is no lull time in this book. It’s the literary equivalent to a Michael Bay movie. (Okay, I just re-read that last sentence, and I think it’s a little too much.)

Let’s talk about gore. There’s a lot of it in here. It’s been awhile since I’ve read an overtly gory book. I haven’t been avoiding them, but I’ve gravitated to more thriller than horror lately. But here’s the deal: Malfi’s gore is there for a reason—to a point. Each blood splatter and length of intestine is there to paint a picture. Except when it comes to the description of the snow creatures entering the body. He describes it in detail. Every. Time. It got redundant and probably added about 10 pages to the book that didn’t need to be there.

Snow is very similar to The Mist. I mean, strange weather phenomenon leads to unseen horrors and anybody caught outside was almost certainly going to be turned inside out or dismembered. I’ll give Malfi this, though: his ending is far less ambiguous than King’s novella (and far less what-the-fuck?-y than the movie).

I didn’t get a chance to read this book in the snow, and perhaps that would have added to its -ahem- chill factor, but it was a solid novel with decent characters (even if they felt forced from time to time, as with Shawna’s back story). Malfi handles the tension well, but there were a few instances where he pulled too tightly and it eventually broke. Unfortunately, one of those times is in the climax with a character who we thought was dead and stopped caring about (hey, sometimes you gotta move on), makes an appearance just in time.

Snow used a simple plot and recycled characters and gave us a solid read. That proves to me that story-telling is more important than plot. I’ve read this story a hundred times under different names by different writers, but I still saw this one through. Why? Because of the story-telling.