Snowblind Book Review

 

Snowblind

Christopher Golden

St. Martin's Press

Pub Date: Jan 21 2014

3/5 Stars

         

          Snowblind was an incredibly hard book to get into.  I spent the first three quarters of the book wishing for it to end.  The pacing is so slow and arduous that you wondered whether the author had actually read the book before putting out there.  Snowblind is one of those old school Stephen King/Dean Koontz sorts of stories.  Which means that it characterizes each and every character in the book to the point where by the climax you should be completely in love with them or at least that these could be real people in an unreal situation.  The problem with that is when a couple of the characters that should ACTUALLY be the main characters are not given their due in favor of having a kind of balance between all of the characters.  Joe Keenan and Jake are obviously the main characters of the book.  But they are given no more “screen time” than anyone else.  Which by the end, you kind of feel cheated.  That the author essentially throws characters away that he’s built up even though he hasn’t built anyone else up enough to sufficiently take their place.  This isn’t about the author killing off my favorite characters, honestly I didn’t really care all that much.  It was more about the promises of the story not necessarily being fulfilled by the end.

           Having said all that the last 25% of the book was excellent and kept me reading.  But if I wasn’t reading this book for review I would have never made it that far.  This is a problem, most readers are just going to get to around 30-40% of this book and be so defeated by the lack of interesting things going on that they will simply put the book down and tell people how bad it is.  I think a lot of editors think that as long as the book has a strong start, it will keep people reading.  Well, the first 25% of the book was pretty descent until it stops abruptly and we fast forward into at least 100 pages of dull storytelling.  So basically what I’m saying is that half this book is good and the other half is terrible.  The book is too long, but the good parts are, well… Good.

           Based on the quality of the story as a whole, I would like to recommend this book.  But considering all the reader has to sit through to get there.  I just can’t…