Operation Backlog Completion 2025
Nov 112013
 

Our next monster story to look at is Snow by Ronald Malfi. This one…is not a favorite. Fair warning to anyone who plans to read it, there will be spoilers in this post.

But let’s start by discussing what I liked about this book–namely, the monsters. Snow is the story of a

This. This is the enemy.

This. This is the enemy.

group of travelers/survivors in a small town that has been taken over by snow monsters. This isn’t just a story in an snowy setting. Here, the monsters are the snow. The first monster seen in its natural form is described as “a hurricane swirl of snow, funneled and compacted so that it was nearly tangible” (Malfi 69). They also have sword-like arms that they drive into people’s backs. However, they aren’t normally seen in that form.

The Snow (capitalized to avoid confusion with regular snow, because the creatures themselves aren’t given a name in the novel, unless it just passed right by me) prefer to take people over. They either use them as temporary puppets–a trick they can perform even with corpses–or enter their bodies to use them as more permanent “skin-suits” (it doesn’t work with children, however, who end up faceless). Either way, they solidify their sword-arms in order to get inside a person. Although these “skin-suits” can imitate humans decently enough, as shown by Eddie Clement, the monsters in Snow regrettably act more and more like zombies as the story goes on.

Actually, more than zombies, the skin-suits reminded me of the Taken from Alan Wake. Just like the Taken need to be blasted with light before they can be killed, the Snow (seriously, was there a real name given to them?) need to be hit with heat, which forces them into a corporeal form. Both are also controlled by an external consciousness–the Taken are controlled by the Dark Presence, and the Snow receive orders from the mysterious storm that rages over the town.

One of the feral children grows up to be Slender Man.

One of the feral children grows up to be Slender Man.

This is all pretty wacky stuff–the monsters look like snow, except they have blades for arms. They take over humans and can imitate them somewhat successfully, except for children, which become faceless for no clearly explained reason (but it’s creepy and reminds me of Noppera-bo, so I’m not complaining), and near the end they show a couple more forms they’re capable of. It’s weird, but I like it. Even though they start acting more like a zombie horde in Snow, the idea behind them isn’t quite like anything else I’ve heard of. And I love snow. It was very interesting to see something I love turned into a monster.

Their origin, motivation, and true nature is never made entirely clear. It’s suggested that they come from “a whole other world, a whole other dimension” (298). The fact that they struck multiple towns, and that the epilogue implies they aren’t finished yet, indicates a plan. It wasn’t just a random event, but the book never gives solid answers, either. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m just glad it didn’t try to tell me they came from genetically modified food.

All right, now that I’ve talked about what I liked, let’s move on to what I disliked.

Everything else.

Okay, that’s unfair. It wasn’t a terrible book. Compared to some literary things I’ve been forced to read, this was a masterpiece. I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t particularly like it, either. I felt nothing for the characters. I found Nan and Fred to be more interesting than any of the others, but the book chose to focus on Todd and Kate. It wasn’t long before I figured out that Todd and Kate were THE main characters, as they encountered various survivors here and there and outlived them. And I just didn’t care. The book tried to throw pieces of their past at me (and either it was my imagination, or every point of view character narrated their sexual history, because that’s what people think about during the Apocalypse, apparently), but it didn’t help. It didn’t feel like character development. It just felt like a bunch of facts about some people I didn’t care about.

Once the skin-suits took on their zombie characteristics, then really all I had was yet another zombie story, with survivors I didn’t care about. And then I was just waiting for it to end.

Snow had an interesting premise and interesting monsters, but they weren’t enough to keep my interest. I would have liked to see more about the Snow–and maybe the point of view of someone as they were taken over. I don’t think we got even a single one of those. It had a lot of potential, but it didn’t live up to it.


Works Cited

Malfi, Ronald. Snow. New York: Dorchester, 2010. Print.

Nov 042013
 

Relic, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln ChildDue to a broken modem, I’m writing this blog post on my iPad in the library, so I won’t be able to easily add links and pictures like I usually do. That makes me sad, particularly since we’re going to be discussing Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. I absolutely loved Relic, and since I started reading it well in advance to have enough time with a decently long novel, and instead found myself glued to the pages, I had plenty of time to think up images to put in here. (I returned later to add images.

For now, Relic. There will be spoilers in this post.

A mysterious tribe that lives on in more than just its legends… A strange artifact taken away… A curse that haunted the tribe and seems to follow the artifact… I could be talking about Scratches again, but this time I’m talking about Relic. (Despite those similarities, which jumped out at me right away, the two stories are extremely different.)

This novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child begins in the Amazon Basin in 1987 with Whittlesey, who is responsible for the discovery and transport of the Mbwun figurine, which he believes is proof that the Kothoga tribe exists. The expedition ends in failure, but the figurine makes it back to the New York Museum of Natural History. The main story takes place at the museum in the present day (around 1994, based on their statements that Whittlesey’s expedition took place 7 years previously), where a series of odd murders begin.

The murders are brutal and strange–a very specific part of the victim’s brain, the hypothalamus, is removed and apparently eaten. There is no sign of who or what was responsible. And the murders match previous unsolved murders that have followed the crates from the Whittlesey expedition on their journey. The unusualness of the situation brings in Special Agent Pendergast, who is pretty awesome. Pendergast joins the rest of the main cast of characters–researcher Margo Green, Dr. Frock, Lieutenant D’Agosta, and reporter Bill Smithback–in their efforts to uncover the truth behind the murders before anyone else dies, particularly with Museum authorities insisting that they continue with their plans to throw a huge opening party for their new expedition.

Yeah, the creature may be the literal “monster” in this story, but special monster points go to Wright, Rickman, and all the other nitwits who routinely stand in the protagonists’ way, and especially to Coffey, an FBI agent who seems to live for the sole purpose of disagreeing with Pendergast.

While their antics sometimes aggravated me to the point where I wondered how anyone could be that stupid, I liked the main characters a lot. I didn’t like Smithback too much in the beginning, but by the end he’d grown on me. I had to laugh when he keeps eating during the chaos until he realizes he’s snacking his way through what could be the biggest story of his career. His goals weren’t as noble as those of some of the others, but he was a good character.

As time passes and the case gets weirder, it becomes clear that the murderer is perhaps the so-called “Museum Beast,” and evidence turns up that suggests it could bear an uncanny resemblance to the mythical Mbwun, or “He Who Walks On All Fours” (Preston and Child 234), from the legends of the Kothoga. As they look at the situation further, Dr. Frock presents his own theory, that “every sixty to seventy million years or so, life stars getting very well adapted to its environment. Too well adapted, perhaps. There is a population explosion of the successful life forms. Then, suddenly, a new species appears out of the blue. It is almost always a predatory creature, a killing machine. It tears through the host population, killing, feeding, multiplying” (203), and that the Mbwun creature loose in the Museum is just that.

I have to say, I loved all of it–the Kothoga legend, the science, and Frock’s theory (which did make me think more than a little bit of the Reapers popping up to wipe everyone out whenever life has reached an advanced enough state).

Sovereign the Reaper from Mass Effect

As monsters go, Mbwun spends most of its time in the shadows for this novel. Bodies are found after they’ve been killed, characters hear the beast walking around, and the figurine is the main link to the creature. It isn’t clearly seen until near the end. However, I thought the mystery surrounding it make it a very interesting creature nevertheless. The link to the plants confused me at first (mainly because of Margo saying “Mbwun” is the name of the plants, which I’m still unsure about), but that turned out to be an interesting twist and gave the monster a motivation beyond “kill people.” It needed plants. It needed those hormones. It needed to eat hypothalamuses if it couldn’t get its plants. The comparison of the plants to a virus was interesting–even more so in the revelation in the epilogue of Whittlesey’s true fate.

My iPad has decided to go crazy on me and make typing this as difficult as possible, so I’ll end here instead of gushing on further about how much I loved this book.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to look up Reliquary,the sequel.


Works Cited

Preston, Douglas, and Lincoln Child. Relic. New York: Tor, 1995. Print.

Nov 012013
 

Well, it’s that time of year again, when people around the world sit down at their keyboards for hours as they try desperately to get out enough words to meet their goal for the day.

NaNoWriMo!

This will be the fifth time I’ve officially participated in National Novel Writing Month, although last year I didn’t actually use it to produce a novel, just assorted writings. This year is going to be somewhat the same, but instead of random bits of writing all tallied together toward the word count, I’m going to write a collection of horror stories. I use the term “collection” loosely. They probably won’t be connected, and I probably won’t consider them a part of a whole. But as far as NaNoWriMo is concerned, my 2013 50,000-word novel is a book of short stories, novellas, flash fiction–whatever they turn out to be. The only rule is that they all have to be horror, or be related to horror (for example, a story with spooky elements would count). I have a few ideas already, so I’ll be typing my first few words as soon as we hit November 1!

To everyone else who is participating this month, good luck! I hope we all reach the end together in triumph.