What do you think?
Rate this book
Oxrun Station #5
Bloodwind
Book by Grant, Charles L.
246 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
2 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
About the author
Charles L. Grant
309 books263 followersCharles Lewis Grant was a novelist and short story writer specializing in what he called "dark fantasy" and "quiet horror." He also wrote under the pseudonyms of Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Simon Lake, Felicia Andrews, and Deborah Lewis.
Grant won a World Fantasy Award for his novella collection Nightmare Seasons, a Nebula Award in 1976 for his short story "A Crowd of Shadows", and another Nebula Award in 1978 for his novella "A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn's Eye," the latter telling of an actor's dilemma in a post-literate future. Grant also edited the award winning Shadows anthology, running eleven volumes from 1978-1991. Contributors include Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, R.A. Lafferty, Avram Davidson, and Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem. Grant was a former Executive Secretary and Eastern Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and president of the Horror Writers Association.
Grant won a World Fantasy Award for his novella collection Nightmare Seasons, a Nebula Award in 1976 for his short story "A Crowd of Shadows", and another Nebula Award in 1978 for his novella "A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn's Eye," the latter telling of an actor's dilemma in a post-literate future. Grant also edited the award winning Shadows anthology, running eleven volumes from 1978-1991. Contributors include Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, R.A. Lafferty, Avram Davidson, and Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem. Grant was a former Executive Secretary and Eastern Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and president of the Horror Writers Association.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 11, 2025
The Bloodwind is one of a series of novels set in the fictional town Oxrun Station, which was quite popular at the time. It's a somewhat Gothic story about a university professor mourning the loss of her teenaged daughter in a town with a very active ancient evil cult and all manner of supernatural hijinks. Think Dark Shadows (the original soap), a very atmospheric slow burn with typical 1970s characters... Pat Shavers is very introspective and not terribly likable, as I recall. I thought it was a well-written book and note he used essentially the same supernatural baddie in his second X-Files novel, Whirlwind. Grant was known as a master of quiet horror or dark fantasy. I liked a little more action and a faster pace, so I was never a huge fan, but it's at atmospheric Halloween choice.
June 28, 2024
Bloodwind is 80% weird little alienated thriller about an almost-forty female college professor whose life is a wreck because she can’t fully process the death of her daughter a few years earlier (and then it is 20% eighties horror monster/wizard gibberish). But the main part is the good stuff here after the story begins with the protagonist having driven home drunk with a new dent in her car, students seem to be going missing, someone keeps coming in her house when she’s not there. Her world is unraveling because she is trying not to think about her daughter’s birthday; and it’s a well-written story about unresolved trauma and madness. But then it’s like, werewolves, a red cloud, cultists… make the third act a monster movie, why not?
November 5, 2019
"Now the grizzly was reduced to a gleaming grey-white marble she had quarried herself, back in the hills that coddled the Station on three of its sides. The gleam came not from polishing; it was a quality of stone she had not seen in any other, and it gave the bear a translucence that at times gave it movement, when the lighting was right and she wasn't quite looking."
We meet Pat, a 39 year-old sculptor and professor, on the Thursday her daughter would have turned 16. Not long after she buried her daughter 8 years prior she met a bear hiking. The bear recognized her in a heart-stopping wilderness encounter, and later she "recognized" it in a few chunks of marble that she carved. (Naturally when the author of THE TEA PARTY talks about rocks a reader pays attention.) Anyway, we follow Pat over the next three days in this soapy campus werewolf mystery. A student is dead and Pat is being stalked. Meanwhile, someone keeps breaking into her apartment and trying to frame her in escalating campus tensions.
Did I say werewolf? Actually it's a killer wind-demon or something, but it reminded me of those werewolf stories where you try to figure out what suspicious character is hiding the deadly, furry secret. Is it the secretive playboy? The nasty dean? The kid holding a grudge? What about the neighbor girl with all those freckles who saw the wind the night Sue died? It never really made sense, even after all the scenes at the end where characters act like they are explaining something. They sort of talk around whatever happened.
I enjoyed reading this book, but it was often frustrating. I think the book would have worked better if it had been written in first person. We are with Pat and her thoughts almost exclusively and constantly, and the exceptions tend to bring the book to a complete halt. It seems like the author really enjoyed hashing out overly detailed descriptions of everything, even when they made the writing annoyingly bad and really confusing. What kind of sentences are these?
"Her boots cracked loudly on the metal-tipped stone, the slot-windows at the landing laddering the floor. (...) Coffee, she prescribed, and rushed along the corridor that wound round the auditorium's wall, heavy pine doors inserted there and pad-locked." Maybe this sounds okay on audio but these took me right out of the book. Not as big of a problem for me were all the contradictions and logical problems. I won't go into these but they really accumulated towards the end.
Even though the author fumbled the story, Pat is a wonderful character. The author entertainingly conveys her temper, her relationships, and the way her attention is always drifting between the present and the past. The themes of communication and creative vs destructive natures were interesting, and there were plenty of well-written wintery chills:
"Immediately, the snow lifted from the ground and blinded her, made her windmill her arms as her boot came down on a patch of ice. She stumbled forward, sideways, and fell. Sprawled. The snow climbing over her, insects of ice that slipped down her collar and into her ears, into her eyes, past her clenched lips and into her mouth. ... and the snow swarmed around her, no longer soft, no longer gentle, striking her like pebbles even after she regained her feet and started running again."
We meet Pat, a 39 year-old sculptor and professor, on the Thursday her daughter would have turned 16. Not long after she buried her daughter 8 years prior she met a bear hiking. The bear recognized her in a heart-stopping wilderness encounter, and later she "recognized" it in a few chunks of marble that she carved. (Naturally when the author of THE TEA PARTY talks about rocks a reader pays attention.) Anyway, we follow Pat over the next three days in this soapy campus werewolf mystery. A student is dead and Pat is being stalked. Meanwhile, someone keeps breaking into her apartment and trying to frame her in escalating campus tensions.
Did I say werewolf? Actually it's a killer wind-demon or something, but it reminded me of those werewolf stories where you try to figure out what suspicious character is hiding the deadly, furry secret. Is it the secretive playboy? The nasty dean? The kid holding a grudge? What about the neighbor girl with all those freckles who saw the wind the night Sue died? It never really made sense, even after all the scenes at the end where characters act like they are explaining something. They sort of talk around whatever happened.
I enjoyed reading this book, but it was often frustrating. I think the book would have worked better if it had been written in first person. We are with Pat and her thoughts almost exclusively and constantly, and the exceptions tend to bring the book to a complete halt. It seems like the author really enjoyed hashing out overly detailed descriptions of everything, even when they made the writing annoyingly bad and really confusing. What kind of sentences are these?
"Her boots cracked loudly on the metal-tipped stone, the slot-windows at the landing laddering the floor. (...) Coffee, she prescribed, and rushed along the corridor that wound round the auditorium's wall, heavy pine doors inserted there and pad-locked." Maybe this sounds okay on audio but these took me right out of the book. Not as big of a problem for me were all the contradictions and logical problems. I won't go into these but they really accumulated towards the end.
Even though the author fumbled the story, Pat is a wonderful character. The author entertainingly conveys her temper, her relationships, and the way her attention is always drifting between the present and the past. The themes of communication and creative vs destructive natures were interesting, and there were plenty of well-written wintery chills:
"Immediately, the snow lifted from the ground and blinded her, made her windmill her arms as her boot came down on a patch of ice. She stumbled forward, sideways, and fell. Sprawled. The snow climbing over her, insects of ice that slipped down her collar and into her ears, into her eyes, past her clenched lips and into her mouth. ... and the snow swarmed around her, no longer soft, no longer gentle, striking her like pebbles even after she regained her feet and started running again."
July 29, 2016
I remember watching the first season of The Simpsons and getting a sense of the layout of Springfield as it progressed. As the show continued, season after season, and as I kept watching, Springfield became larger and larger, with more and more major landmarks that defined the city. After several seasons of the show, and after images started to hit the Internet trying to fit all of Springfield into one single picture, I started to realize that Springfield was huge.
I bring that up because I'm starting to feel that way about Oxrun Station. In the first few novels, I was under the impression that the city was really a town, quaint and removed from large pockets of civilization, but with the last two novels, the town is becoming more of a city, with the more affluent citizens living apart from the rest of the town, a university, and even its own rock quarry. Grant populates the town with what's necessary to tell the story, but as the city grows, it becomes less quaint, and less removed. With the strange goings-on that are characteristic of the town, it becomes harder to accept them as the city grows larger and people still choose to remain there.
The Bloodwind isn't really a good Grant novel. It's better than The Curse, but not by a whole lot. Grant takes a ridiculous amount of time creating the protagonist in the novel, and while he does pepper that time with a few portentous events, it takes a whole lot longer for the story to get going that it did in his previous novels. In those novels, he still went at his own pace to develop the story, but here it just begins to drag on and on, testing the reader's patience. In an odd moment of irony, the main character, Pat, gets frustrated with another when the other character refuses to get to the point about something.
Once the story gets underway, the novel gets a lot better, but that doesn't really happen until about halfway into the book. It's actually a better buildup and conclusion than what I've seen in his previous books (there's less ambiguity and more of a definitive "We beat the bad guys" vibe to it, without wrapping up all of the loose ends), but having to get through the first half of the novel is too much of a chore to call it a great novel. Had he gotten to the point more quickly, I might have considered this the best of his novels I've read thus far.
I bring that up because I'm starting to feel that way about Oxrun Station. In the first few novels, I was under the impression that the city was really a town, quaint and removed from large pockets of civilization, but with the last two novels, the town is becoming more of a city, with the more affluent citizens living apart from the rest of the town, a university, and even its own rock quarry. Grant populates the town with what's necessary to tell the story, but as the city grows, it becomes less quaint, and less removed. With the strange goings-on that are characteristic of the town, it becomes harder to accept them as the city grows larger and people still choose to remain there.
The Bloodwind isn't really a good Grant novel. It's better than The Curse, but not by a whole lot. Grant takes a ridiculous amount of time creating the protagonist in the novel, and while he does pepper that time with a few portentous events, it takes a whole lot longer for the story to get going that it did in his previous novels. In those novels, he still went at his own pace to develop the story, but here it just begins to drag on and on, testing the reader's patience. In an odd moment of irony, the main character, Pat, gets frustrated with another when the other character refuses to get to the point about something.
Once the story gets underway, the novel gets a lot better, but that doesn't really happen until about halfway into the book. It's actually a better buildup and conclusion than what I've seen in his previous books (there's less ambiguity and more of a definitive "We beat the bad guys" vibe to it, without wrapping up all of the loose ends), but having to get through the first half of the novel is too much of a chore to call it a great novel. Had he gotten to the point more quickly, I might have considered this the best of his novels I've read thus far.
April 30, 2022
I wouldn’t say this is a bad book, but it’s a stupid one. Nothing happens besides a lot of lip licking, talking to oneself and laughing at one’s own ~silly little thoughts~, interoffice politics I don’t fully understand, and then whammo! We get a twist with only 8 pages left that made me laugh out loud. It was kind of a cozy read but it was also insanely, insanely stupid.
October 23, 2011
Awesome, as always...and with a little more of an upbeat ending, this time.
April 22, 2024
The Bloodwind is unexceptional as a novel of campus politics, and as a novel of an occult onslaught spurred by sexual jealousy. For the first two-thirds of the story, softness and banality hold sway. Grant's shorter works are typically graced with snap and sharpness. Here the to-ing and fro-ing of the heroine and her cohort do not rise above the soporific. When the showdown and climax come, the effort is perfunctory.
August 7, 2024
The Oxrun Station books previous to this one have been about 80% vibes, 10% dumb romance subplot that hits the same basic steps every time, and 10% horror. Bloodwind was 50% vibes, 10% dumb romance subplot that hits the same basic steps every time, and 40% horror.
And look, I have liked all the Oxrun books so far, but this one really stepped it up a notch.
And look, I have liked all the Oxrun books so far, but this one really stepped it up a notch.
November 28, 2023
This, the fifth outing to Oxrun station, is I thought a better read than some of the previous books.
More of a supernatural murder spree with themes of hate and jealousy and giant red beasts
More of a supernatural murder spree with themes of hate and jealousy and giant red beasts
July 28, 2010
A good solid effort from Grant, who always did atmospheric stuff very well.
October 28, 2013
Drags a little but pays off in the end. 5 stars again for one of the masters of quite horror.
June 27, 2014
Too bad this was the last Oxrun Station novel...
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews