Week 12: Snow

I’m not sure about all of you, but it seems fitting that this week the book in question is Snow by Ronald Malfi—I haven’t been warm in a week and I’m still in denial over the first snow of the season. I finished the book under piles of blankets with a fleece zipped up to my chin, and I still couldn't get warm. The reading material didn’t help the cause.

I know I've mentioned in past blog posts that I’m not a fan of snow, or winter, or being cold in general. I’d rather be too hot than too cold any day. Snow was the third piece this term that was set in an extremely cold setting—first 30 Days of Night set the stage in Alaska, followed by The Thing in Antarctica, before finishing up in Woodson, Minnesota with Snow. 

The setting of Snow pulled double duty in this week’s book, and this was the first and only of the term that’s done so. Not only is the setting enough to make your skin crawl (literally, goose bumps abound) but the setting is the monster. Snow itself is the beastie that goes bump in the night.

If I didn't have enough issues with the cold…

It all starts with Todd traveling cross-country to visit his son. However, all flights are cancelled due to a freakishly intense snow storm. Todd decides to rent a car anyway and drive the rest of the way to his son. At this point, it was like watching a bad horror movie when screaming, “DON'T GO IN THERE!” at the TV starts. One of the worst snow storms in history and we’re going to drive in it. Insert face palm here.

But how else are the hero and the people he picks up at the airport going to encounter the monsters? It’s clear something strange is afoot after picking up a hitchhiker with vertical slashes over his shoulder blades. Turns out he's been possessed by the Snow. The Snow, or skin-suits as they’re later called, are these near-formless beings that need a host to become solid and feed. They attach and insert themselves through the shoulder of their hosts by means of scythe-like limbs in place of hands. Any trace of the host is gone. Even though the bodies can be destroyed, the Snow will only be damaged. Fire is their only vulnerability, as the heat gives them solid form and strips them of defense.

The most unsettling thing about the Snow is what they do to children. For whatever reason, the Snow can't inhabit a child-host without erasing all facial features. It’s like “The Idiot's Lantern,” the episode of Doctor Who when Rose loses her face. There's no explanation as to where the Snow came from, but it's implied they're aliens. 

While I did find the faceless children both disturbing and sad, I was underwhelmed with these monsters. Aliens have popped up now three times this semester, and so many of the monsters this term were reliant on a host. The hosts in Snow become zombie-like, and I'm starting to tire of zombies. While the book was a fast read and I enjoyed aspects of it, these monsters did nothing for me. It was three hundred pages of the main characters running away from the Snow. Yes the Snow were active monsters, which I enjoy, but there was a profound lack of backstory for them. Lack of backstory isn't always a bad thing, but they weren't the most interesting monsters I've read about. I had a hard time getting invested in the quest to defeat the Snow.

Also, the end of the Snow was predictable. It was made clear around the middle of the book that they could be defeated by fire, so it felt like a long while before a big enough explosion came about to wipe them out. Yet the ending is left open. It's revealed that Woodson wasn't the only city plagued by the Snow, so the beastie-alien are free to run around the country looking for a bad enough snow storm to ride in on. 

What I enjoyed about this book was the dialogue and the setting. The dialogue was fast paced and read how people talk. I appreciate a well-placed juicy expletive because it’s real (or maybe my perception is warped because I work with a bunch of sailor-mouths), and let’s face it. If someone’s running away from the Snow with its scythe-hands of doom, “Oh fudge” probably isn’t what would come out of most mouths.

I also liked that the setting was both a setting and a monster. I've read books where the setting absolutely contributed to the scare-level, but I liked that Malfi took this a step further and had the snow become a perversion of nature. I think it had more of an impact because it’s so cold right now. Might not have thought about what’s riding on the cold wind so much if it was a balmy 80 degrees out.

Let's just say, this book didn't change my opinion about snow, but I’m not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

Week Eleven: Relic

This week it’s out of the cold and into the museum in the novel Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

First, let’s talk about the monster. The bad beastie in this novel is called Mbwun, which translates into “He Who Walks On All Fours.” The name itself is an indication of the rich history Preston and Child gave their monster, which I don’t always need, but almost always enjoy when it’s given to me. Mbwun is an ancient creature. The son of a demon who’s the South American equivalent of the Devil. Part primate, part lizard, all intelligent killer. A clear image of Mbwun is never given, which reminds me of how the audience isn’t given much of a chance to look at the Alien.

Flash forward (or backward) to the nineties, and an artifact bearing Mbwun’s image in a crate full of egg-like pods and unusual plant fibers is sent from the Amazon Basin to the New York Museum of Natural History. But no one expected the stowaway….

Dear Mbwun hitched a ride with the crate to the museum, and he has an addiction to hypothalamus glands in human brains. He is able to live quietly for years eating the plant fibers in the crate, because these fibers have a genetic makeup that mimics hypothalamus glands. But once his access to the plant fibers is cut-off, our monster must find sustenance elsewhere.

With this, the brutal killings start.

Overall, I liked Mbwun as a monster. He’s not merely a killing force of nature who only acts on instinct. He is highly intelligent in an almost human way. He knows to remain out of sight and only started the killings after his plant source ran out, which I think is interesting. He’s practically indestructible with a thick hide that bullets can’t penetrate, but his weakness is a bit cliché: the eyes. Ah well.

What I didn’t like was how this particular monster came into being. Throughout the entire book, everyone keeps focusing on the egg-like seed pods, which left me assuming they weren’t seeds at all. There were a couple mentions of Whittlesey—the head of the exhibition that went to South America and brought back Mbwun—disappearing, but it doesn’t seem too far-fetched because there’s a monster on the loose. Yet in the epilogue it’s revealed that Whittlesey became Mbwun by eating the plant fiber. I had to read the explanation a couple times before resigning myself to an “Okaaayyy…” It bothered me that I’d been led through this book to believe that Mbwun had hatched, when on the last couple of pages the rug was pulled out from under me. I now have some trust issues with this book.

Anyway, another thing I enjoyed was the setting. I love museums, and some of the exhibits lend themselves to letting imaginations run wild. Not only are there plenty of places in the museum itself for the monster to hide, but the museum is built over an elaborate tunnel system. And while the museum is large, it becomes a prison if locked with Mbwun sneaking around inside looking for tasty morsels.

Now, even though there were aspects of the book I liked, I had an issue with pacing. The probably impacted my perception of the pacing, but for whatever reason, this almost 500 page book was 959 pages on my Nook. One flip of a “page” might have counted for three pages, but there’s no denying parts of this book were slow. A lot of time was focused on the technology used to analyze what Mbwun was, and these parts dragged. Even though the search to find out more about the museum monster was a constant throughout the entire story, I felt there was a lot of down time between when I got to see the monster in action.

Overall, not my most favorite book, but parts of it I enjoyed. Not sure if I enjoyed it enough to want to see the movie, though. But I might just be more careful of the shadows next time I go to the museum.