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Cold Shocks
A collection of sixteen horror tales set in frigid locales includes works by Graham Masterson, Chet Williamson, Gary Brandner, Nancy Holder, Steve Rasnic Tem, and others
309 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1991
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About the author
Tim Sullivan
119 books60 followersTimothy Robert Sullivan was an American science fiction novelist, screenwriter, actor, film director and short story writer.
Many of his stories have been critically acknowledged and reprinted. His 1981 short story "Zeke," a tragedy about an extraterrestrial stranded on Earth, has been translated into German and was a finalist for the 1982 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. "Under Glass" (2011), a well-reviewed semi-autobiographical short story with occult hints, has been translated into Chinese and is the basis for a screenplay by director/actor Ron Ford. "Yeshua's Dog" (2013) was also translated into Chinese.
Many of his stories have been critically acknowledged and reprinted. His 1981 short story "Zeke," a tragedy about an extraterrestrial stranded on Earth, has been translated into German and was a finalist for the 1982 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. "Under Glass" (2011), a well-reviewed semi-autobiographical short story with occult hints, has been translated into Chinese and is the basis for a screenplay by director/actor Ron Ford. "Yeshua's Dog" (2013) was also translated into Chinese.
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October 6, 2021
So here's a random, representative example of a typical 1990s horror anthology. I read it's companion piece (Tropical Chills: Fourteen Tales of Scorching Horror to Make Your Blood Run Cold, natch) before I was reviewing things on Goodreads. The overall theme of this volume is not a bad choice for a themed horror anthology - cold - so you get Winter, the Arctic, the Antarctic, blizzards, snow, etc. It's a vague enough of a hook to hang a variety of stories on, without repeating itself too much (Eskimo shamans show up in about 3 stories). It's interesting to speculate how, by the 90s, the paperback anthology was replacing the newsstand magazine as the basic forum for presenting new short fiction, instead of its previous role as collecting the "best" reprints of previously published fiction.
Is it any good? Well, it's just okay. There was no outstanding story here, I felt, but a handful of good ones, some good but flawed and a lot of just okay pieces.
Two stories did nothing for me. In the case of Melanie Tem's "The Ice Downstream" - well, I try to be open-minded in my reading and I appreciate a number of approaches to the genre (in fact, I feel I have pretty catholic tastes) but - this is a story in which the basic metaphor (ice/cold and the freezing/thawing of an individual as representative of grief over the premature death of a family member) is heartfelt but overwrought, pounding you over the head with the symbolism. But then, that's the whole point of the approach and I imagine some people could like something like this but... not me.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there's "The Ice Children" by Gary Brandner, in which an investigative team is sent to the remote arctic icepack to solve a mystery, only to discover Inuit mythological monsters called Angiak have overrun the area. Brandner gets some points for striking monsters - deformed children left to die in the arctic wastes but which live on as twisted demons - but the whole things reads like a perfunctory, 90's action horror film put to paper in a brief sketch (you even get the wise ethnic native team member whose "superstitions" nobody believes until its too late). Despite the setting, there's little atmosphere. Despite the intensity of the scenario, little character development. Despite the direct drive of the plot, it ends in one of only two ways it possibly can. Essentially, it's pulp (direct, straight-ahead, plot-driven storytelling) but a good example of how modern pulp can suffer the same faults as its original models.
I appreciated the authentic-feeling, modern Alaskan setting of Michael Armstrong's "The Kikituk" - in which a ex-cop is sent to collect the mentally challenged son of friend from the airport, only to find the boy is sporting some stranger shamanic "familiar" creature in his jacket - and the realistic characters, but the plot itself felt sprawling and shapeless and the resolution left some plot points hanging (what about the airport murder charge?). An elderly women attempts to help free the spirit of a previous nursing home tenant during its annual manifestation in "The Christmas Escape" by Dean Wesley Smith. There was nothing technically wrong with this story, but it felt kind of perfunctory and lacked tension (everything goes as the woman plans - end of story!).
What Barry N. Malzberg's "Morning Light" had to do with the theme of this anthology is beyond me. This trippy tour through the last moments of famous modernists poets who committed suicide was also pretty much a miss (death is cold? perhaps that's it). So there's that. Not bad, I guess, but didn't work for me. Then there's "Close To The Earth" by Gregory Nicoll- a story which, I swear, I wrote myself back when I took a few stabs at writing horror fiction. I'm not kidding - I had the same basic plot (individual involved with toxic waste dumping returns to the locale years later and eats at a diner, only to have a run in with mutated townsfolk) but mine was set at a beach town instead of a mountain town, and I played up the "twisted mutant monstrosities" aspect in a more grotesque, TALES FROM THE CRYPT revenge form, whereas "Close To The Earth" works harder at achieving Stephen King-type blue collar character authenticity and has a much more low-key ending.
Speaking of TALES FROM THE CRYPT - "Colder Than Hell" is, in some ways, your typical EC story plot (the dead return to revenge a murder) but Edward Bryant does some nice, setting atmospherics and subdued character studies within this basic plot - a taciturn, childless, couple (nurturing hurt and resentment) caught in an enormous blizzard on their remote Wyoming ranch circa 1915 - utilizing the details of farm life and the precautions one must take under white-out conditions (stringing guide lines between buildings) and evoking "The Monkey's Paw" in its climax. "A Winter Memory" by Michael D. Toman is a strange story in which a young man, late at night and while attempting to rescue his car from being stuck in the snow, stumbles into an odd, nightmarish scenario of hunters and monsters. This story may have meandered a bit and the quasi-explanatory ending, while serving to make the preceding events seem less random, isn't one of my favorite "twist" concepts - still, I felt the story did a pretty good job of being a realistic character sketch and creating some solid dream/nightmare logic ambiance.
"The Bus" by Gregory Frost is in general, a good example of stories produced by horror writers in the 80s and 90s as they grappled with representing the rise in the homeless population once Reagan's social Darwinism program cuts came into effect. In the specific, a homeless man realizes a suspicious bus parked on the street late at night is not all that it seems. This was entertaining for what it was - stories like this tend to have 2 endings - one metaphysical, the other politically symbolic. The choice Mr. Frost makes is the correct one, lending a little more "meat" to the story relative to its length.
S.P. Somtow is featured here with a full-length novella, "The Pavilion of Frozen Women" - I haven't read much Somtow but I've liked what I've read, mostly. In this, a Native American photographer attends an annual "snow sculpture festival" in Japan, when a serial killer strikes. On the good side, there's some extended ruminations on culture clashes (American in Japan, woman in Japanese patriarchal culture) and, especially, racial identity (the photographer's Lakota roots, the genius snow sculptor is a member of Japan's indigenous - and disparaged - people, the Ainu, another character is an American black woman from the south). On the weak side - well, it's as much (if not more) a whodunnit murder mystery in plot construction as a proper horror story, and I'm not a big mystery buff. Even worse, the ending devolves into some metaphysical, new-age gobbledygook - generally, I find my tolerance for this stuff varies - I either like it applied in lighter doses (as in some other stories here), with well-researched cultural authenticity, or with real/symbolic ambiguity or psychological underpinning. Here, it's way too straightforward.
As I said, there weren't any truly "excellent" stories here, but there were a number of good, solid stories.
"First Kill" by Chet Williamson is a nice, compact little tale contrasting a man who goes hunting deer every year, without any intention of killing any, and a man who has gone hunting this year to kill a deer hunter. Effective, honest characterization - honest resolution. Graham Masterton's "The Sixth Man" begins with a mystery hiding in plain sight in a historical photo and features a subsequent journey to - and emergency survival in - Antarctica. In retrospect, there a a few unanswered questions (thus making one wonder if their initial deployment was only for dramatic effect - is there a valid answer to the initial question of "who took the photo?", and what about the chewed bodies?) but, plot holes or not, this was a pretty good read.
A documentary producer, after interviewing the "acid jester" himself, makes conversation with a flirty airline hostess - but something goes terribly wrong during the subsequent flight home in "Bring Me The Head of Timothy Leary" by Nancy Holder, an (unsurprisingly) lysergic little nightmare scenario. The story does a good job of immersing the reader in an increasingly frightening bad trip. I also liked "Adleparmeun" by Steve Rasnic Tem, although it's hard to say exactly why. An aging Denver lawyer, Eskimo by ethnicity and only child survivor of his village's decimation by circumstance, finds himself haunted by a bear god, which transforms the city around him. Similar material is handled less well in other stories in this collection - I liked this one for its character depth and emotional honesty (I'm misusing the actual definition of 'decimation' in that above blurb, I know, unless his village consisted of only 10 people - which is possible).
The last two stories to mention - honestly, both of them I would have considered excellent, due to the invention of their central concepts - I felt the endings let them down in both cases, but not enough to make them anything less than still quite good reads (a good concept can lift a mediocre story, even if the hope it generates doesn't reach full fruition). "Snowbanks" by Timothy Robert Sullivan has a great set-up, very reminiscent of my own childhood, in which a precocious young boy goes too far while digging tunnels through the snow and stumbles onto a secret underworld. I found the climax a bit too "afterlife/philosophical" for my tastes, but the set-up is very well done indeed, capturing the mindset and voice of a kid perfectly. A.R. Morlan's "St. Jackaclaws" also works the kid mind-set theme, along with being another entry in the very dicey "holiday horror tale". Few genre stories that attempt to tell a horror tale tied to Christmas or Halloween work as good as the handful of classics, but Morlan has a fresh idea here, as the brightest wit in a gaggle of neighborhood friends envisions the previous existence of a dead winter god, his symbols strewn across the winter holidays (Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, even a hint of Thanksgiving in there) as he is dismembered as a sacrifice to commerce. The ending may be the standard horror story "imaginary monster" ending, but I was really taken with the idea here, fraught with great, if untapped potential.
So, there you go. In honesty, a 2.5, but there's no half points in Goodreads, so 2 it is. Even one solid homer would have bumped it up to 3.
Is it any good? Well, it's just okay. There was no outstanding story here, I felt, but a handful of good ones, some good but flawed and a lot of just okay pieces.
Two stories did nothing for me. In the case of Melanie Tem's "The Ice Downstream" - well, I try to be open-minded in my reading and I appreciate a number of approaches to the genre (in fact, I feel I have pretty catholic tastes) but - this is a story in which the basic metaphor (ice/cold and the freezing/thawing of an individual as representative of grief over the premature death of a family member) is heartfelt but overwrought, pounding you over the head with the symbolism. But then, that's the whole point of the approach and I imagine some people could like something like this but... not me.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there's "The Ice Children" by Gary Brandner, in which an investigative team is sent to the remote arctic icepack to solve a mystery, only to discover Inuit mythological monsters called Angiak have overrun the area. Brandner gets some points for striking monsters - deformed children left to die in the arctic wastes but which live on as twisted demons - but the whole things reads like a perfunctory, 90's action horror film put to paper in a brief sketch (you even get the wise ethnic native team member whose "superstitions" nobody believes until its too late). Despite the setting, there's little atmosphere. Despite the intensity of the scenario, little character development. Despite the direct drive of the plot, it ends in one of only two ways it possibly can. Essentially, it's pulp (direct, straight-ahead, plot-driven storytelling) but a good example of how modern pulp can suffer the same faults as its original models.
I appreciated the authentic-feeling, modern Alaskan setting of Michael Armstrong's "The Kikituk" - in which a ex-cop is sent to collect the mentally challenged son of friend from the airport, only to find the boy is sporting some stranger shamanic "familiar" creature in his jacket - and the realistic characters, but the plot itself felt sprawling and shapeless and the resolution left some plot points hanging (what about the airport murder charge?). An elderly women attempts to help free the spirit of a previous nursing home tenant during its annual manifestation in "The Christmas Escape" by Dean Wesley Smith. There was nothing technically wrong with this story, but it felt kind of perfunctory and lacked tension (everything goes as the woman plans - end of story!).
What Barry N. Malzberg's "Morning Light" had to do with the theme of this anthology is beyond me. This trippy tour through the last moments of famous modernists poets who committed suicide was also pretty much a miss (death is cold? perhaps that's it). So there's that. Not bad, I guess, but didn't work for me. Then there's "Close To The Earth" by Gregory Nicoll- a story which, I swear, I wrote myself back when I took a few stabs at writing horror fiction. I'm not kidding - I had the same basic plot (individual involved with toxic waste dumping returns to the locale years later and eats at a diner, only to have a run in with mutated townsfolk) but mine was set at a beach town instead of a mountain town, and I played up the "twisted mutant monstrosities" aspect in a more grotesque, TALES FROM THE CRYPT revenge form, whereas "Close To The Earth" works harder at achieving Stephen King-type blue collar character authenticity and has a much more low-key ending.
Speaking of TALES FROM THE CRYPT - "Colder Than Hell" is, in some ways, your typical EC story plot (the dead return to revenge a murder) but Edward Bryant does some nice, setting atmospherics and subdued character studies within this basic plot - a taciturn, childless, couple (nurturing hurt and resentment) caught in an enormous blizzard on their remote Wyoming ranch circa 1915 - utilizing the details of farm life and the precautions one must take under white-out conditions (stringing guide lines between buildings) and evoking "The Monkey's Paw" in its climax. "A Winter Memory" by Michael D. Toman is a strange story in which a young man, late at night and while attempting to rescue his car from being stuck in the snow, stumbles into an odd, nightmarish scenario of hunters and monsters. This story may have meandered a bit and the quasi-explanatory ending, while serving to make the preceding events seem less random, isn't one of my favorite "twist" concepts - still, I felt the story did a pretty good job of being a realistic character sketch and creating some solid dream/nightmare logic ambiance.
"The Bus" by Gregory Frost is in general, a good example of stories produced by horror writers in the 80s and 90s as they grappled with representing the rise in the homeless population once Reagan's social Darwinism program cuts came into effect. In the specific, a homeless man realizes a suspicious bus parked on the street late at night is not all that it seems. This was entertaining for what it was - stories like this tend to have 2 endings - one metaphysical, the other politically symbolic. The choice Mr. Frost makes is the correct one, lending a little more "meat" to the story relative to its length.
S.P. Somtow is featured here with a full-length novella, "The Pavilion of Frozen Women" - I haven't read much Somtow but I've liked what I've read, mostly. In this, a Native American photographer attends an annual "snow sculpture festival" in Japan, when a serial killer strikes. On the good side, there's some extended ruminations on culture clashes (American in Japan, woman in Japanese patriarchal culture) and, especially, racial identity (the photographer's Lakota roots, the genius snow sculptor is a member of Japan's indigenous - and disparaged - people, the Ainu, another character is an American black woman from the south). On the weak side - well, it's as much (if not more) a whodunnit murder mystery in plot construction as a proper horror story, and I'm not a big mystery buff. Even worse, the ending devolves into some metaphysical, new-age gobbledygook - generally, I find my tolerance for this stuff varies - I either like it applied in lighter doses (as in some other stories here), with well-researched cultural authenticity, or with real/symbolic ambiguity or psychological underpinning. Here, it's way too straightforward.
As I said, there weren't any truly "excellent" stories here, but there were a number of good, solid stories.
"First Kill" by Chet Williamson is a nice, compact little tale contrasting a man who goes hunting deer every year, without any intention of killing any, and a man who has gone hunting this year to kill a deer hunter. Effective, honest characterization - honest resolution. Graham Masterton's "The Sixth Man" begins with a mystery hiding in plain sight in a historical photo and features a subsequent journey to - and emergency survival in - Antarctica. In retrospect, there a a few unanswered questions (thus making one wonder if their initial deployment was only for dramatic effect - is there a valid answer to the initial question of "who took the photo?", and what about the chewed bodies?) but, plot holes or not, this was a pretty good read.
A documentary producer, after interviewing the "acid jester" himself, makes conversation with a flirty airline hostess - but something goes terribly wrong during the subsequent flight home in "Bring Me The Head of Timothy Leary" by Nancy Holder, an (unsurprisingly) lysergic little nightmare scenario. The story does a good job of immersing the reader in an increasingly frightening bad trip. I also liked "Adleparmeun" by Steve Rasnic Tem, although it's hard to say exactly why. An aging Denver lawyer, Eskimo by ethnicity and only child survivor of his village's decimation by circumstance, finds himself haunted by a bear god, which transforms the city around him. Similar material is handled less well in other stories in this collection - I liked this one for its character depth and emotional honesty (I'm misusing the actual definition of 'decimation' in that above blurb, I know, unless his village consisted of only 10 people - which is possible).
The last two stories to mention - honestly, both of them I would have considered excellent, due to the invention of their central concepts - I felt the endings let them down in both cases, but not enough to make them anything less than still quite good reads (a good concept can lift a mediocre story, even if the hope it generates doesn't reach full fruition). "Snowbanks" by Timothy Robert Sullivan has a great set-up, very reminiscent of my own childhood, in which a precocious young boy goes too far while digging tunnels through the snow and stumbles onto a secret underworld. I found the climax a bit too "afterlife/philosophical" for my tastes, but the set-up is very well done indeed, capturing the mindset and voice of a kid perfectly. A.R. Morlan's "St. Jackaclaws" also works the kid mind-set theme, along with being another entry in the very dicey "holiday horror tale". Few genre stories that attempt to tell a horror tale tied to Christmas or Halloween work as good as the handful of classics, but Morlan has a fresh idea here, as the brightest wit in a gaggle of neighborhood friends envisions the previous existence of a dead winter god, his symbols strewn across the winter holidays (Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, even a hint of Thanksgiving in there) as he is dismembered as a sacrifice to commerce. The ending may be the standard horror story "imaginary monster" ending, but I was really taken with the idea here, fraught with great, if untapped potential.
So, there you go. In honesty, a 2.5, but there's no half points in Goodreads, so 2 it is. Even one solid homer would have bumped it up to 3.
July 17, 2019
This collection of winter horror stories wasn't as good as I'd hoped.
"First Kill" was good, "The Bus" was creepy, "The Kikituk" wasn't bad.
I didn't like "Adleparmeun" and "A Winter Memory", and "Morning Light" is boring and incomprehensible to any reader who's not a scholar of obscure poets who died more than 50 years ago.
The most disappointing kind of horror or thriller story is that which starts out really promisingly, but fizzles out at the end, like "Close to the Earth", "The Sixth Man", and "The Christmas Escape".
"First Kill" was good, "The Bus" was creepy, "The Kikituk" wasn't bad.
I didn't like "Adleparmeun" and "A Winter Memory", and "Morning Light" is boring and incomprehensible to any reader who's not a scholar of obscure poets who died more than 50 years ago.
The most disappointing kind of horror or thriller story is that which starts out really promisingly, but fizzles out at the end, like "Close to the Earth", "The Sixth Man", and "The Christmas Escape".
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