Two weeks ago, Christine Sinclaire’s husband slipped off the roof while hanging Christmas lights and fell to his death on the front lawn.
Desperate to escape her guilt and her grief, Christine packs up her fifteen-year-old son and the family cat and flees to the cabin they’d reserved deep in the remote Pennsylvania Wilds to wait out the holidays.
It isn’t long before Christine begins to hear strange noises coming from the forest. When she spots a horned figure watching from between frozen branches, Christine assumes it’s just a forest animal—a moose, maybe, since the property manager warned her about them, said they’d stomp a body so deep into the snow nobody’d find it ’til spring.
But moose don’t walk upright like the shadowy figure does.
They don’t call Christine’s name with her dead husband’s voice.

IN A NUTSHELL
On the upside, ‘Cold Snap‘ is an ambitious horror novella that deals graphically with the overwhelming impact of trauma, grief and guilt on a newly widowed mother’s mental health. The cover art is striking, and the narrator is skilled. 

On the downside, the novella falls short of its ambition and, after a strong start, it gradually collapses in on itself, leaving me feeling disengaged and unconvinced.

For me, ‘Cold Snap’ was a horror novella that almost succeeded in walking the line between mental illness and supernatural manifestation in an empathetic way that made me feel the raw emotional distress of a newly widowed mother whose mind is breaking under the stress of shock, grief and guilt.

The first half of the novella was powerful and deeply sad. It starts with a mother and her teenage son heading off to spend Christmas in a remote cabin in the woods. Both of them are hollowed out by grief. The mother, Christine, keeps slipping into a trance state in which she is overwhelmed by the memory of watching her husband fall to his death as he tried to put Christmas lights on the roof. Christine’s distress is so great that she’s barely functioning. She’s taking her son to the cabin because she can’t stay in the house where her husband died, and because it was a vacation that her husband had planned and had been looking forward to.

It was painful to watch Christine losing herself, making mistakes in practical matters, struggling to connect with her son, tormented by grief over her husband’s death and guilt that she survived.

By the middle of the novella, it seemed to me that Christine had almost lost herself and had given up on ever connecting with her deeply unhappy and angry son. There was an incident with the frozen corpse of a cat that vividly portrayed a mind that had lost touch with reality. 

I was caught by surprise when, the next morning, there seemed to be a rapprochement between mother and son, with Christine taking control and planning their departure. Then their car is destroyed by an aggressive moose, and everything changes.

I wasn’t convinced by the picture that was drawn of Christine’s mental state after this. Even in the midst of a life-threatening situation, Christine continued repeatedly to lose herself, recalling the moment of her husband’s death, using the same words each time, like replaying a video in her head. In the first half of the book, I found this to be a powerful way of getting Christine’s grief across, but it was used so often that, towards the end, it pushed me out of the story rather than pulling me in. It was clear that Lindy Ryan wanted the reader to be uncertain about how much of what was happening with the moose was real and how much was a product of Christine’s wounded mind. I liked that idea, but not the execution. For me, it was too muddled and too contrived. The final scene didn’t work for me at all. 

Your experience may be different to mine. Perhaps you’ll be swept along on the outflowing of grief and guilt in a way that I wasn’t.

I thought Jenn Lee did a great job with the narration. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.