Winterlong

Winterlong #1

by Elizabeth Hand

This first novel is a richly imagined work set in a Washington, D.C., devastated by nuclear and biological warfare. Society is rigidly stratified: the Ascendants, absentee rulers who were responsible for the devastation; the Curators, who tend the city's nearly destroyed museums and libraries; the Paphians, who barter sexual favors for goods; and the Lazars, wretched survivors of periodic germ warfare who subsist by cannibalism. In this far-future world where a post-holocaust civilization has created its own myths from the remnants of the past, a young woman genetically altered to feel others' emotions and a young man trained from birth as a sacred prostitute find themselves inexplicably drawn to each other as a mad dictator schemes to bring about the "Final Ascension."

Compared with the works of Margaret Atwood, WINTERLONG explores the disturbing remains of humanity irrevocably altered by genetic engineering run amok.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction, Dystopia, Post Apocalyptic, Horror, Speculative Fiction

440 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1990

About the author

A New York Times notable and multiple award– winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written seven novels, including the cult classic Waking the Moon, and short-story collections. She is a longtime contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post Book World and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. She and her two children divide their time between the coast of Maine and North London.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

dense, poetic, sensual, at times almost dizzyingly arty in its depiction of a post-apocalyptic washington dc. i much prefer elizabeth hand's trippy trilogy (of which Winterlong is the first, and the best) to her later attempts at stylish modern gothic, which came across as half-baked to me. written at the dawn of her career, her voice reminded me of tanith lee's, except she ups the sadean stakes quite a few notches. the novel is fascinating - mutated plague children, vicious dog-creatures (aardmen!), a god of blood & evil taking residence in a little girl's mind, antiquated scientists continuing their morbid experiments...it had everything i never knew i wanted in a far-flung science fantasy. best of all: doomed Aviator Margalis Tast'annin, a monster, a madman, dying only to be reborn as a terrifying leader of men and dogs alike.

[Anastasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mythical fantasy/horror clad in science fiction. In a weird post-apocalyptic world, portions of science survive: such as the Human Engineering Laboratory (HEL) where autistic children tap into patients' brains to cure their nightmares. Outside, an abandoned city is grown over with carnivorous trees and run over by bands of feral cannibalistic mutants (children caught under viral rain) and gene-engineered human-animal hybrids. Amoung them, vestiges of civilization are tended by Houses of Botanists, Zoologists, Natural Historians and courtesans. The story follows Wendy, an autistic girl who somehow wakes up and harbors a demonic god, the Hanged Boy, a lord of beauty and death, and Raphael, a courtesan in the city.

[Eli · Rating 1 out of 5]

So much potential.
Here's my thoughts on pages 1-240: WTF NO, why so many gross, disturbing scenes and perversions? Where's the plot? Is this scifi or creepy porn? Also, THREE rape scenes (one with a CORPSE??)? Thanks for the nightmares, Ms. Hand.
Pages 248-300: oo, maybe..? There's a dreamy, chill quality as the twins' voices get stronger and the story develops--OH COME ON. more grossness? A talking skeleton? Sure, why not. Thanks for the nightmare, Ms. Hand.

301-346: LOL WUT. This ending makes no sense. with a bonus rape scene.
I'm not smart or refined enough to enjoy this. I loved her short stories, and this was her first novel, so I may give Hand one more try before banishing her to the Hated Author Island.

[Katya · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit of cyberpunk, a bit of mythology and a bit of horror make for a perfect mix in this dystopian novel. I've been a fan of Elizabeth Hand ever since I got my hands on a copy of Black Light and this, her first novel, is probably the most incredible debut I'd ever read. Hand doesn't shy away from uncomfortable subjects and is very upfront with gore and sexuality, yet managing to avoid making it obscene. A gorgeous, unsettling, perfectly-worded and -paced novel.

[Laylah Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most gorgeous, lush, hallucinatory things I've read in a very long time; it's dark and decadent and bizarre, and occasionally it seems to lose its way in its own excesses, but mostly it's beautiful and terrible as the dawn.

[Elentarri]

DNF at 40%

This was just not working for me. Interesting idea, but it just wasn't going anywhere and I don't like the writing style.

[Katherine Harbour · Rating 5 out of 5]

A weirdly beautiful and disturbing fantasy set in a future after a disastrous bio-war, when dark gods roam the earth and animals speak. Science has created this fantastical world, but it doesn't seem like science fiction, with its pagan mythologies and tribal spirits. The story centers around two twins, an autistic girl and her beautiful twin brother. Separated and living in different cultures--she's a patient in a hospital run by shady scientists and he's a courtesan in a corrupt society ruled by people called Curators--they are forced out into a ruined world where death is king. Combining Peter Pan, Lord of the Flies, and old myths, this is a compelling read.

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you do not live in DC, I am not sure I can recommend this book. If you do live in DC, there is something delightful about our city, frequently neglected in fiction except as a site for political intrigue or a bombing target, taking center stage as a decadent post-apocalyptic dystopia full of mad curators and impossibly beautiful sex workers. This is DC geography that remembers the city stretches beyond the Capitol and the White House and revels in its quirkier aspects.

Beyond that, there's convoluted theology/metaphysics involving a battle between personifications of femininity and masculinity, basically the struggle that Hand will later revisit in Waking the Moon. I didn't like it much there and I don't like it much here. But those opium-growing botanists and genetically experimenting zoologists, the natural historians endlessly cleaning and recleaning the Egyptian sarcophagi they've forgotten don't hold the original settlers of the Americas--I was happy to spend a few days wandering the city with them.

[KA · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stylistically, Hand is a good writer. Yes, her characters are a bit lacking in dimension and much of the book is unnecessary to the plot. But what really disturbed me was the gratuitous suffering she puts her characters (and walk-ons) through. It's more sadistic voyeurism than drama. Seriously, don't read this book if you have PTSD and written depictions of torture are triggering.

Also, like Waking the Moon, the plot revolved around the perceived dichotomy between the Masculine Principle and the Feminine Principle in religion. Unlike Waking the Moon, Winterlong presents the Feminine Principle as Good and the Masculine Principle as Evil. Way too simplistic.

Still, it's her first book.

[Kevin Klein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hand has a powerful command of prose, but her characters, plot, and underdeveloped setting leave much to be desired. For me, this was a classic case of "good idea executed poorly." I picked Winterlong up at a used bookstore because of a combination of three things: a cool cover, a cool title, and an interesting back blurb.

It's books like these that I wish I didn't feel compelled to finish reading everything I start. About 100 pages through I knew it wasn't for me, but I kept pushing through. It was a bit torturous at times, but I'm done now. Sorry Ms. Hand, but from now on, in my world, your books will be remaining on the shelf.

[Scott Rhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautifully crafted novel, Elizabeth Hand's "Winterlong" is nevertheless a challenge to read, as it employs biblical references, Greek myths, and even Disney's "Pinocchio" to tell a haunting post-post-apocalyptic tale. The story follows two young children---twins separated at birth, actually---as they travel the former U.S., ravaged by viral epidemics and bio-genetic experiments run amok. This is an excellent thought-provoking science fiction novel. Hand's writing is poetic, even as her ideas are radical and somewhat cyber-punkish. Parts of the novel are reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's sf novel "Oryx and Crake" (although Hand wrote her novel almost a decade before Atwood).

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book I read by Elizabeth Hand. I was totally blindsided by it. Her vision of the end of the world as we know it and what takes its place reads like a waking dream. All sorts of strange things inhibit these pages. Intelligent Chimps, autustic prophets, decadent, intellectual societies. There are also feral children, augmented killer dogs and scattered deadly war zones. What a trip. it has been many years since I read this and I still remember my sympathy for Miss Scarlett, the Shakespeare performing chimp that believed science would make her whole.

[Fred Jenkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had not previously read any of Hand's early books. I really like the Cass Neary books and Waking the Moon. Winterlong is okay, but not likely to reread it. Post-apocalypse is not my favorite genre. The split narration, with alternating sections of first-person by the two protagonists, is also not a technique that resonates with me. Much of the action is set in Washington DC, with recognizable remnants of many places: the Smithsonian buildings (where Hand worked as an archivist), the Washington monument (the "obelisk"), the National Cathedral. The goddess in various guises and Dionysus (both recurrent themes in many of Hand's works) appear frequently. The book has its moments, but iis sometimes wearing; I much prefer her later books.

[Rich Rosell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Hand has created an interesting post-apocalpytic future with Winterlong, and even though her writing is often maddeningly complex the narrative eventually takes hold and her usage of obscure words/phrases becomes more familiar and less cumbersome. To this point there's a mention in Hand's afterword about how her editor called her out for her use of "bizarre or archaic words", so that made me feel a little better that it wasn't just me.

The main storyline takes awhile to develop, yet Hand's characters and environs made it worthwhile.
As the first book in a trilogy Winterlong manages to remain a fine stand alone read, but I'm intrigued enough by the groovy weirdness to dig into the next two volumes.

Outstanding world building, with an ending that goes fairly dark and uncomfortably grim. Oh yeah, there's also a talking chimp who thinks Pinocchio is a documentary from the past...

[Suzanne Thackston · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love this book. Every time I come back to it I love it more and for different reasons. It's weird, creepy, haunting, terrifying and best of all, Dionysian.
I didn't like the rest in the series nearly as much.
But this is one of my desert island books.

10/21/24
Finished another glorious re-read of this one, a life favorite. Funny, this time I enjoyed the first half more than the second. Something about the doomed, cobwebby, shabby gentility of this last stand of post-apocalyptic survivors touched my heart.
But I loved it all. Can't wait for the next re-read!

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started this series with the wrong book. Or maybe with the right one, I don't know.
I read Aestival Tide a while ago, and it was quite interesting. Interesting in the sense of awakening my curiosity.
The style was a bit too presumptuous (I can live with that) and there were some horror scenes that were too unsettling for me, but it was an strange read - and that's got some mesmerazing power over a reader.

Because Aestival Tide happened to be the sequel of Winterlong, the logical path was fixing my mistake and reading it now.
Same style (as I said I don't mind some authors overdo it a bit, as far as they don't do it poorly - and Hand writes certainly well), also unsettling horror scenes (involving children again *sighs*), but the plot was not nearly as fascinating as Aestival Tide.
Or maybe it's that I got bored of this bizarre post-apocalyptic world, I don't know.

If you read Aestival Tide reviews you'll notice that a bunch of readers mention that it's much worse than Winterlong - I feel quite the opposite.
I'm inclined to assume that they are so different that many readers who loved one of them would feel betrayed by the other one. Maybe if I had not read Winterlong I might have liked this better - I'll never know.

[MargaretDH · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars, rounded up to 3.

Elizabeth Hand writes some weird stuff, and sometimes it does it for me, and sometimes it does not. Another reviewer called this book lush, and that's absolutely true. Hand creates a post-apocalyptic world full of sex, drugs, violence and the grotesque. Flora and fauna are full of mutations from past nuclear war and ill-advised genetic manipulation. Society is barely organized, and groups of people cling to one another and compete for scarce resources. And there's also a weird kind of Twelfth Night thing with male-female twins separated and cross-dressing, oh, and also the twins are bound up in a death cult.

In the afterword Hand says that she was trying to explore the differences between consciousness and reality. And, in no way discounting the possibility that I am too much of a dummy to get it, that's not what I saw. I kinda liked it? But this was just too weird, too chokingly rich.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

“long” for sure. without meaning to, i seem to have read three post-apocalyptic science-fiction novels this year, all of which feature a traveling theatre company. it’s a fourth, however, that winterlong owes a greater debt: the book of the new sun. among the many things borrowed from that classic, happily, is some very evocative prose, enriched by a wonderfully archaic vocabulary. although the events in the novel are superficially dramatic, they are also hilariously over-the-top. chekov doesn’t merely have a gun in this one, but…well…no spoilers.

[Sonnydee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hot damn, I love this book. It's not perfect, but it hits the spot.

First, the things I didn't like. Major spoilers ahead.

1) The way that, towards the end, things started leaning towards an unambiguously supernatural explanation for events

What I found really brilliant about this story is the ambiguity. Most of the characters are so absorbed in their own small worlds that they can't put the puzzle together. But the reader can. The best example of this is the bright light in the sky. Wendy thinks it's a comet or something. Raphael thinks it's a supernatural sign of a new era. The Aviator says that it's a space station exploding. One could choose to think that Raphael and Wendy are right, depending on what kind of story they want this to be, but the Aviator's explanation clarifies SO MUCH about the world. Like, for example, what an Ascendant even is.

And then Wendy manifests the Hanged Boy in front of a crowd of people, and makes out with Justice's ghost, and I guess one could still argue that these things might only be happening inside her head but it feels more like Hand is saying "no this shit is for real" and I kind of hate that. Maybe that's because I'm biased towards science fiction in favour of other kinds of spec fic. Maybe the whole point is that some things defy explanation, which I'm enough of a romantic to believe is true. But damn it, those few scenes really messed up my suspension of disbelief and made me feel a bit misled.

2) Justice.

In a way Justice is refreshing because he's pretty much a dude version of so many fictional women. He's pretty, he's nice I guess, for some reason he really wants to fuck the protagonist, he's mostly useless, he dies unceremoniously for the sake of the protag's character arc.

But he's the most boring worthless character and I didn't buy his relationship with Wendy at all. At first I thought maybe the point was that this was a shallow adolescent romance and Wendy is putting more stock in it than she should, as teens do, but then at the end Wendy's humanity hinges on how she feels about Justice and like his ghost gives this speech that's supposed to be moving or something.

That kind of frustrates me because Wendy's relationships with Miss Scarlet Pan and Jane Alopex are not only more interesting but more convincing, even though Jane is introduced pretty late in the game. (Incidentally this is my problem but I kinda feel like Hand queerbaited me. Jane is clearly a huge dyke, she and Wendy make out and brain fuck each other and are both pretty into it (even though Jane almost dies?), Jane kills the Aviator, and I'm supposed to accept Justice as a leading man? Come on. Jane for leading man!)

Also, Wendy believes (and it seems the audience is meant to believe) that the moment she becomes Truly Human is when she weeps over Justice's corpse. Sure, okay. The moment she becomes Truly Human, if you ask me, is the moment she decides not to kill Jane. It's the first time she feels remorse for hurting another person. She does it in part for Miss Scarlet Pan, which is significant, and in part because she has a thing for Jane's brain. It's a great scene!

3) The grimdarkitude

By the fortieth time a kid got impaled and beheaded I was over it.

Bonus: why the fuck is this creepy science werewolf thing named Trey. That's the worst name for a creepy science werewolf thing.

Now, the things I liked

1) literally everything else.

Damn I love these characters. They're all pretty much horrible people. Like, truly horrible. Raphael tries to rape his pal, accidentally kills her in the scuffle, and then goes ahead and rapes her corpse. Wendy mind fucks a six year old girl, driving her insane and almost killing her, and doesn't care. The characters who are pretty okay are pretty pathetic. But somehow, I love them all. Except Justice.

I love the prose. It's purple as hell and it works. I felt like I was drowning in it. It's so opulent it's hedonistic. Reading this book is what I imagine smoking opium is like.

I love the world. The worldbuilding is killer. Hand is like a magician, creating this spectacle, distracting your eyes, timing it all just right so that you go nuts when she finally reveals her cards. But she doesn't reveal too much, and that's part of the fun of it. There's still that sense of mystery, of "maybe it really is magic."

I love that it's a story about stories, and about how we act out these ancient stories even though at the end of the day none of us is Baal, or the Magdalene, or the Consolation of the Dead, we're just a bunch of broken people trying to find something worth believing in.

I'm excited to read more Hand. Although if she fails to make the sexual tension between Wendy and Jane add up to anything in the next two books of the trilogy I will be unhappy.

[Kay · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want to like it. Really, I do. I love Elizabeth Hand's two books Black Light and Waking the Moon (especially the latter). Winterlong is a different sort of book.

This is the type of sci-fi where you're dropped into a world you know nothing about and immediately expected to hit the ground running. I like some of those types of books if things are gradually explained. Nothing is explained about this world; it's written as though you already know everything. This is frustrating as hell, because I'm constantly going "What? Wtf is that? Why are they doing that thing? Huh? What's going on?!?" To add to that, Hand decided to use a ton of obscure slang and literary words that I'm wholly unfamiliar with. I'm a pretty widely read person, and I'm still having to look up at least one word every other page.

There's also a lot of fucked up shit going on. Necrophilia, incest, pedophilia (with VERY young children)...you name it, I'm sure it's in here (I expect scat to show up in the sex play at some point or another). This means that this book wears on you emotionally, if you're the type to imagine too vividly the action on the page. It's also a creepy book, not only for the reasons listed immediately prior to this sentence. It's creepy in a way that I can no longer read it before going to bed (I started Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone just so I'd have something to read before going to sleep again).

This reminds me of her other book I read (Generation Loss), which I hated. Disappointing. Then again, there have definitely been interesting parts, and something other than sheer stubbornness is making me keep reading, so we'll see.

I found this book revolting, and then I got a little over halfway done with it and all of a sudden she leaves off most of the disgusting shit that didn't need to be in there at all and starts to actually focus on the plot. It's like she remembered "Oh wait, Chuck Palahniuk has the monopoly on the Nasty Shit Book market. I can pay attention to my storyline and stop trying to compete with that hack." (Yeah, I said it. Wanna fight about it?) And so she did, and the book improved dramatically.

And all that buildup for nothing! The ending is supremely frustrating. I shan't give it away, but trust me - skip this one. Read her other two I mentioned earlier. This one has the same themes, but here they seem tired and annoying.

[Angie Gibson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really, really wanted desperately to love this book. The bones for a phenomenal story were there. They were right there waiting to be used. The characters had the potential for much depth. The society set up did as well. To me, the downfall of this book was too much emphasis on minute setting/environment description and not enough on storytelling and character development. I felt like I had just started to get to know and understand the two main characters at the end of the book.I mean the very end. It took me that long to BEGIN to absorb the extremely complex world she was try to jam into the reader in much too large of pieces. That's what it felt like, like being forced to swallow too much food at once, too fast. That world and its story just wouldn't all fit the way she was trying to feed it to the reader and forget being sorted and broken down into enjoyable pieces.

I like the characters. I like the idea. But in order to pull off a story with such a very complicated plot and setting, the author must be, above all, a good storyteller. Hand has a beautiful Dickens-esque quality to her descriptive writing but she needs to pull her story together into a cohesive piece that can be understood and absorbed by the reader. I didn't feel compelled either by being lightly floated through the story or plowing through it in excitement or invested so much that I turned the pages w/ apprehension or even swept away. I know it's too late now but I'd love to see her rewrite this. Sit down and really invest in the story in its entirety.

One last thing, this actually irritated me a quite a bit. You had an entire section of the society you created dedicated to the pleasures of the flesh but yet you could not or would not write a decent sex or lovemaking scene? You cannot say that you didn't want it to take away from the story itself because it was already a part of it. You chose to have these Houses as part of the story, a big part yet you did not take the reader into their world at all. You couldn't even write effectively enough about the main character's struggles with sex to make the reader get how significant that piece was. Why shy away from that when it's such a big part of the world you built?

Again, so much potential but it just didn't deliver.

[Olivia]

I don't really know what to say about this book. I can't say I enjoyed it, but I can't say that I *didn't* enjoy it. I haven't often seen story elements this socially shocking handled the way they were handled here. It made the whole thing weirdly powerful, an examination of individual and cultural identity that I had not encountered before. Wendy Wanders was a severely autistic person whose brain has been modified so tat she can empathically treat other people's mental disorders by absorbing their emotions and memories. She and the other empath children trade these bits of stolen emotions like hits of an exotic drug (which they also have plenty of on hand). On the other side of the river in the City of Trees, her twin brother has been brought up in one of the Paphian houses, which are basically child brothels, though each has it's own rituals distinct character, and everyone seems okay with it. Overall, there was a good bit of rape and incest, but it was mostly beside the point. It deals with questions of identity and humanity and sanity and how differently we may choose to define those things. It's all blended well with myths and the way humans interact with these powerful stories that often define human culture.

I can't rate it until I've digested it, and I haven't yet. I might not be able to. It might just become a stone in my mental gizzard forever.

I *think* that means it was very, very good.

[Dave Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

My impression of this book is not so much about the story as it is of the time and the place where it was written. Liz was working at the National Air and Space Museum in the mid-80s when this book was written, and the Washington DC setting, however transformed by her dystopian future, acts as a major character in its own right. I was living in Washington throughout most of 1986-87, and the places she describes - the Cathedral, the ruins of Metro Center, the wasted environs across the river - were my old haunts. Her Pathians are not so different from the punks, artists and bicycle couriers who haunted DC Space, the 930 Club and Whitlows, and who made up the core of my friends. The first time I read Winterlong, in about 1990, I was so caught up in the story that it didn't even occur to me that I was there when it was being written, and that the book was, to a large extent, about my adopted home of that time. It was not until I reread it years later that I realized that I knew these streets, and had hung out with these people, however transformed by the deadly effects of the viral strikes...

[Rory · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an old favorite of mine (the "date finished" is for my current read-through, I first came to this book in the late '80s). The author herself describes it as, essentially, a big sprawling earnest mess with the best of intentions (it was her first book), and I suppose that would be fair, but only if you can imagine a big sprawling earnest mess of vividly realized characters, emotions sharp as knives, completely unique concepts on the border between science fiction and urban fantasy, and dreamlike imagery that haunts you for hours after you put down the book. The actual plot is labyrinthine and difficult to follow, but for my part, when I'm in a mood for this book, it doesn't matter; I just let all that go and wallow in the atmosphere the book creates.Elizabeth Hand

[Juushika · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a futuristic dystopia, siblings from entirely different backgrounds are haunted by the same alien figure. I admire Hand's intent, and I can see how it matured into Waking the Moon, which I quite enjoyed. But Winterlong is unsuccessful. It's a feverdream dystopia, frequently creative but occasionally laborious; the characters lack agency, which hobbles the plot; the setting is evocative but piecemeal; the initially haunting image of the Boy resolves into a simplistic and undeveloped archetype. At her best, Hand creates an atmosphere of the gothic, decrepit, haunted, sensuous, and dreamlike--but while Winterlong shows glimpses of that style, it lacks plot and characters to support it. Don't bother with this one.

(And where, in the closed environment of post-apocalypse Washington, DC, do the imported drugs and medications come from?)

[Dorian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC this book falls somewhere between fantasy and science fiction. If I had to relate it to the work of other authors I would suggest Angela Carter, Ian Macdonald and Gene Wolfe. It is as much a fin de siècle novel as it is anything else, full of lushly beautiful prose and haunting imagery. It is not an easy read. It is not for those with sensitive stomachs or a trenchant moral outlook, in other words, the easily offended. But, if you want to read something that will take you beyond the boundaries of genre fiction; that will amaze you, and challenge you and your view of the world, then this book is well worth reading. You will not come away from it without feeling something. It gets an extra star just for bravery.

[Steffen Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF@20%

There was much to like but what finally did me in was the lack of world building. And when I use the term "lack" I mean lacks any explanation of past events, terminology, and the like to the point of blind confusion. Not that the background matters that much to the plot in this novel, but if the author is going to offer background they can't just say (and I'm paraphrasing), "two hundred years ago the big one happened" and leave it at that--period. And to bring this sort of thing up often with no follow through? Crazy making. Maybe the author was going for mystery but after 20% I just found it too distracting. No doubt there are more patient readers who are willing to wait for the payoff. Not me. Too bad, because the rest was interesting.

[Clarice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the possible future in Washington DC... when the people still living there fall into a few small groups... the past has been turned into mythology or forgotten and the world is being changed by biochemical warfare and rampant genetic mutation. There's also a lot of storyline involving some primal mythic concepts and the interplay between the conscious and the subconscious that is interesting and fun. I think this read through I managed to get a lot more out of it than I have in the past, which is really satisfying.

Still a pretty enjoyable read overall. Definitely an early work by Elizabeth Hand though.

[Broodingferret · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another used bookstore impulse buy that turned out to be a good idea. Set in a post-Apocalyptic world (you get the impression that there have been several Apocalypses, actually), Winterlong is a surreal tale of magic and old gods reawakening into a world torn and warped by science used badly. The story contains some truly unique ideas and characters and makes creative use of many concepts from various world religions and myths, all of which is made more impressive by the fact that Winterlong was Hand's first novel. I look forward to reading the other two books in the trilogy.

[Jerry Balzano · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.2 stars. "A thing of terrible beauty", this novel. Not as gross as other reviewers make it out to be; really, I have one of those "sensitive stomachs" (I cannot read Chuck P. for example, even though part of me would like to), and this one, although it definitely made me cringe several times, never reached the level of repugnance. Maybe describing vile acts in beautiful language is somehow less disturbing than doing so with coarse language? I will definitely be checking out the sequel ("companion novel", I believe the author calls it) ... and as for Winterlong ... it's not just worth a read, it's worth a reread ... someday.