She convinces herself she’s imagining things and Darnshaw is good for her son. She finds a weird cross craved into the front door of her apartment.ĭespite this, Cass displays a kind of mind-numbing stupidity that made me want to punch her.
Everyone is hostile towards her or overly-friendly. She creates web sites and faces losing her client because she doesn’t have internet access. Littlewood should have taken a leaf out of his book.Ĭass starts to think things are seriously wrong in Darnshaw after only a couple of days. Levin doesn’t tell us what’s really going on until almost the end and the setting in the city if New York is a highlight.
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin is decades older and deals with the same subject matter in a far superior way.
I expected better of Littlewood given how original her short fiction is. It’s a caricature of the kind of place you expect creepy cults to be hiding out. However, Darnshaw is an obvious, stereotypical setting for a weird satanic cult. I don’t have an issue with this as a plot. Littlewood may as well have printed BAD SHIT IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN THIS CREEPY PLACE in luminous letters across the pages.Ī Cold Season deals with Satanists who’ve summoned a man to the village, possibly the devil who goes about corrupting the souls of the children. Her son starts to act hostile and weird as soon as he comes home after his first day at school. The villagers are weird from the moment she sets foot in the place. The snow comes and cuts off the village before she’s even got any supplies in. However, there are so many weak things about A Cold Season they detract from the things I enjoyed.Ĭass becomes isolated almost from the start. I loathe novels with completely happy endings that tie a neat little bow around everything. Cass, Ben and her still-alive husband have escaped Darnshaw and the satanic cult but Littlewood makes it clear there might not be a happy ending despite this. The best is when Cass tries to walk to the next village and ends up at a clearing surrounded by standing stones and discovers the creepy snowmen are actually the dead, tortured and mutilated bodies of anyone who’s tried to help her in Darnshaw. She’s great at building tension and atmosphere. There are good things about A Cold Season. I’ve read a lot of really original short fiction by the author. The blurb makes the novel sound appealing. Now threatened on all sides, Cass finds herself pitted against forces she can barely comprehend…Ī Cold Season was a bit of a let-down for me. Then the blizzards blow in, and Darnshaw is marooned in a sea of snow. Cass is trying to rebuild her life after the loss of her soldier husband, and a renovated mill in the picture perfect village of Darnshaw looks to be the idyllic spot to bring up her traumatised son, Ben.īut the locals aren’t as friendly as Cass had hoped, and Ben is beginning to display a hostility she can’t understand.
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