Book Review: A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons (2001)
William Morrow
(This review contains spoilers.)
I read A Winter Haunting immediately on the heels of Summer of Night, hoping that it would smooth out and enrich the soil that I heaped on the grave of the first novel. Little did I know, the second book would only tangentially touch on the events of the first book, opting instead to use the same setting forty years later to tell a very different tale.
Dan Simmons’s 2001 follow-up to his personal childhood reimagining is a shorter, sleeker novel, and it does a better job at staying in the lines and tying up loose ends. The youthful vision he began with has been replaced by the cynical, bloodshot stare of middle age, and we see this in Dale, the main character and only returning member of the Bike Patrol to directly appear in the novel.
The Promise of Youth?
Dale is having a somewhat hard time in life, at least in the ways a financially successful boomer can have a hard time. Dale followed his childhood dream and became an author, and now finds himself a modestly successful novelist and professor of English in Missoula, Montana. He has two daughters and an ex-wife with whom he seemingly gets along with in the few times we hear her on the periphery of the story.
Only Dale isn’t so great, you see. Dale is heartbroken because a grad student thirty years his junior decided to break off their summer romance and go back to getting a person her own age. (Who didn’t see that coming, Dale?? Does that ever work out differently??) Our protagonist is so sad, in fact, that he’s elected to take his sabbatical in his old hometown of Elm Haven, Illinois, where he and his childhood friends once battled an ancient evil that had been roosting on the town like a vulture for hundreds of years.
Only Dale doesn’t quite seem to remember that; he has his childhood shotgun (this is totally something that exists in rural communities–I had one), a Savage over-under 410, in the back of the car he’s driving, but doesn’t recall he once used it to blast away at supernatural hellspawn that had taken up residence in his old school. Dale also tried to kill himself with the same weapon a few months before the story opens, but the gun auspiciously misfired, and Dale was spared.
Grown-up Problems
I’m really bad at holding back things that irk me in these reviews, so let’s rip the bandaid off now: I couldn’t find any level of sympathy for Dale.
To be clear, a character doesn’t have to be sympathetic to make a good story; as long as a character and their situation prompts some sort of aesthetic or emotional response, we have a path to a working novel, but this conflicts with the rest of the narrative in my assessment. Simmons wants us to like Dale–and I certainly did after the first book! But this weirdly incongruent note bothered me, as Dale’s whole thing seems to boil down to ‘I miss my old super cute daughter-age girlfriend and I’m SO SAD.’ Because Simmons returns to this thought time and time again through the novel, I have to conclude he thought it would read differently than it actually does. Dale feels like a deeply overprivileged and entitled old person who is distraught primarily because he’s no longer banging a twenty-five-year-old girl.
Art Imitates Art Imitating Life
While Dale may not remember the supernatural saga of his youth, he does remember Duane McBride, the excellently-written character who Simmons killed off midway through the first novel (to its significant detriment, in my opinion), and has rented Duane’s old farm house in order to take up the task of exorcizing the ghosts that haunt him by writing a new novel based on his childhood. After moving in, he goes about town and promptly runs into a few old faces in the form of C.J. Congden, the insufferably sadistic bully from the first novel, who is now sheriff (they always find a way, right?) and Michelle Staffney, the one-time adolescent bombshell now turned failed Los Angeles actress-housewife, complete with second-rate plastic surgery and giant fake tits (as this is an author of a particular generation, these will be described several times).
This is the moment I knew we were going into a story more about the injustices of time’s passage rather than antediluvian horror. Dan Simmons has taken his pure, elemental child characters from Summer of Night and put them in the microwave. At that point in the novel, I was game.
To make matters worse, there’s a gang of skinheads in Elm Haven, and they are none too happy that Dale has moved back to town. Apparently he penned some strongly worded editorials about the militias in Montana some years back, and this put him on the radar of his hometown neo-Nazis. Between the town bully becoming the law, the gang set on harassing him, and the ghosts in his head, Dale is going to have a hard time writing that novel and finding the solace he sought.
I think that’s probably enough on the plot if you want to pick up the book. So if you’re going to keep reading, here there be spoilers.
A New Season
The first thing I noticed with A Winter’s Haunting is the immediate improvement in and modernization of Simmons’s writing style. The prose is sharper, the plot much more in-focus, and the narrative doesn’t wander or take indulgences as it frequently did with Summer of Night. This was a good thing at the beginning of the novel, but I found myself wanting a bit more of the old treatment by the end. The plot is so lean, so focused on Dale, that the reader is going to have to make do without a reprieve–which is tough because Dale is a tragic yet wholly unsympathetic character.
While Dale’s observations are suitably sharp, and the attentions he gives to the old McBride homestead will remind readers of the best moments of the first novel, the man is ultimately wallowing over the life he willingly destroyed in the name of chasing pelt (that’s what boomers called trying to have sex with a woman. You’re welcome, Gen Z. I’m going to go wash my hands now.) and every time the plot gets a bit interesting, Simmons puts us through some insufferable memory of Dale and his grad student. These sections aren’t poorly written, but they are discordant, and the whole time I found myself wanting him to get back to the main plot rather than rehash something that happened off-page.
To make matters worse, Clare, the grad student Dale is endlessly pining for, is a vapid and unlikeable edgelord who explores her Blackfoot roots at Dale’s side with all the intellectual resonance and interest of a TikTok influencer. Dan Simmons, whom I place in the highest echelon of authors, has put two deeply unlikeable, unrelatable characters at the heart of his novel, and that's put it on terrible footing more or less from jump.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t even the worst part of this novel. There are many, many great novels without particularly appreciable or applaudable main characters. My biggest gripe with A Winter’s Haunting was that it meanders, starting to venture down the path of the old conflicts before scrapping all of that three quarters of the way through in favor of a half-assed, one-foot-in, stumbling cartwheel in which the supernatural aspects of the first novel halfway meld with Dale’s psychological demons. To put it more explicitly, C.J. Congden, the novel’s strongest antagonist, and Michelle Staffney, Dale’s sole friend in Elm Haven, both turn out to be ghosts who have no impact or agency in the story’s conclusion.
I had to rewrite the second half of that last sentence because I kept typing it in caps.
Simmons literally pulls the rug out three quarters of the way through the book as it spirals into a meandering mishmash of boomer psychological degradation. It’s like if Shirley Jackson wrote like Danielle Steele.
I was completely gobsmacked. Dan Simmons is a great author; The Terror and Abominable are among the best horror novels I’ve read in the last decade. But with A Winter’s Haunting, he bills the book as a follow-up to one of his better-known novels while it only has tangential connections to the previous entry. He then fails utterly to create anything new or interesting, seeming to eventually tire of the story and tie it off as best he can before electing to never return to Elm Haven, Illinois again.
My review of the first book heavily compared the novel to Stephen King’s IT; if it had to put the second in quick summary it would sound like this: this book could have used some effing space spiders.
Verdict: 3.5/10
Strengths:
Can be read independently of Summer of Night
Good prose
Weaknesses
Meandering plot with few consequences
Destroys goodwill garnered by first book
Main character now sucks
You can purchase A Winter Haunting at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, or preferably, through an independent bookstore in your community.
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