Мистерията отвън или мистерията вътре.

Това е основният въпрос в 4-тата книга от поредицата, а зимата логично е 4-тия сезон. Съвсем нелогично започнах именно от нея, защото четох, че другите са по-добри :)
Т.е. в преследване на градация.

Изумява ме колко често главният герой в американските произведения е професор на средна (или превалил средна) възраст. Със здраво либидо, но поразклатена психика. Същият отишъл на някое ново място, а всъщност на добре забравено старо. Уж някое отдалечено местенце, дълбока провинция, а пък да очакваме интересни случки. Такъв е и тук сюжетът. Веднага трябва да призная, че авторът добре си служи с думите. Хареса ми езикът - непретенциозен в пряката реч и достатъчно описателен, където е нужно. Харесаха ми препратките към Египетската книга на мъртвите, към староанглийски и др. езици. Към произведения и автори.

Не ми допадна стериотипността на конструкцията. Завърнал се след 40 г., в голяма къща, оказала се без желаещи да я обитават след като се е споминал собственикът. Затворен втори етаж. Живяно е в мазето. Намира стари познати от гимназията - местното момиче блян и местния гамен, който станал шериф. Има някакъв инцидент от гимназиалните им години, който ще се окаже сърцевината на историята. А ... скинхедове, черни кучета. Неща, които на края не ме впечатлиха. Има един разговор между него и шерифа към края, който ми допадна и след това екшънът и съспенса - по-скоро не.

Дали странни явления се случват, или просто професорът не си е пил хапчетата - не знам, проверете сами, ако ви стиска :)

Накратко - историята те държи в себе си, но не е нещо, което да задържиш за себе си.

Engaging, but it didn't do the one thing a horror novel should do. It didn't scare me. The fact that I've seen many of the plot devices before - a man with a past, a haunted house (of course), questionable sanity (elicited early in the novel by a scene of the MC in his psychiatrist's office), psychotropic drugs that make everyone around the MC question his version of events - probably didn't help any more than the rather tired is-it-or-isn't-it-real feel the novel had. Simmons manages to make it feel somewhat real by interspersing the ghost of a murder victim in first-person throughout, but much of that felt like he was telling me the story rather than showing me what happens. Simmons is a good writer, possibly even a great one, but this novel is not his best effort. If you want him to scare you, read DROOD.

Though this is considered a sequel to Simmon's classic "Summer Of Night"; if you loved that book....skip this one. SLLOOOOOWWWWWW and boring.

So, i had never read this when it first came out.....no I realize I did not have to even read it at all. This story of 40 years later, and Dale comes home to Elm Haven to try to write his novel about the Summer Of Night, in 1960, and having a split up with his wife, and a suicide attempt, he realizes that everyone has ghosts in their pasts. So, what. This is way too long and drawn out.....skip it.

I gave it only 2 Stabbys.

Minor spoilers...but not really.
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A pretty good solid loose sequel to SON... I say loose as Dale returns to his home down after a failed marriage and suicide attempt. He rents out his old dead friends home in an attempt to write an novel. His past and horrors come back to haunt him and it's done really well. It does start slow but picks up well and builds really really well. Some great twists and threats. I love how the story passes from Dale and Duanes narration.

I loved Summer of Night, a horror novel around a group of boys set in 1960 Illinois. When I saw Dan Simmons built it out into a series he calls Seasons of Horror, I was excited for more! Now that I'm done reading all the sequels I could find, I'm totally confused by the assertion that the middle two are connected to the original.

SoN was an excellent small town horror novel in the vein of King's fictional locales of Derry or Castle Rock, Maine. The second novel, Children of the Night, was a pretty traditional vampire tale with a medical twist, and it had NOTHING to do with the first novel except that one of the MCs, Father Mike O'Rourke, had been one of the boys from Elm Haven, IL. This fact was so subtle that if I hadn't gone back and compared character names, I wouldn't have known there was ANY connection to the first book.

The third book, Fires of Eden, isn't available anywhere (I admittedly didn't look THAT hard), but if I read French I could buy a copy off Amazon. Boo hoo. Looking at the Goodreads blurb, none of the characters' names appear connected to the original book, although I'm mildly intrigued by the premise of angry volcano gods.

Not enough to burn more calories looking for it, mind you.



Now here we are at A Winter Haunting, and I finally get a taste of what I've been craving - a return to where it all began.

English professor Dale's wife divorced him after she caught him cheating. His mistress (a former student) dumped him only a few months later. His drinking in the aftermath forced the dean to impose an involuntary sabbatical. Dale's feeling washed up, lost and suicidal. He decides to rent a place in his old hometown of Elm Haven, and the one he picks is Duane McBride's old place - a kid he was close with until his untimely and grisly demise. Soon after moving in, a series of inexplicable goings-on unsettle his nerves, and harassment from a bunch of town losers ensure there's no peace for him.

Then there's all the black dogs that keep showing up in and around his house, only to mysteriously disappear when he chases them away...

This book was the second-most-enjoyable of the series, but it's a second place so distant you could say it belongs in a different competition. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have stopped after the first book.

This was a really pleasant surprise. As I was not extremely impressed with Summer of Night, I didn't exactly rush to read A Winter's Haunting, which was said to be a sequel.

I wish I didn't, as it's not a direct sequel, only uses certain events and characters from the first novel. It's an excellent tale in its own right: Dale Stewart, one of the characters from SON, returns to the town where he grew up. After a failed marriage and a sucicide attempt, he decides to finish writing his novel. He feels as if he was lost, missing something important; during the stay at the small town in Illinois he'll discover much more than he bargained for.

The whole novel is very Henry Jamesian, with a brooding gothic mood. Simmons does an excellent job with keepint the theme, suspense and atmosphere, and A Winter's Haunting is much less drawn out than it's predecessor. His sense of character and imagery is strong, and although this one never won particular recognition it's one of his better and shorter ones, far away from bloated monsters like Carrion Comfort - which, although enjoyable, could have easily been reduced to half their size. A winter's Haunting is cold and unrelenting, and cuts straight to the bone. I liked it a lot.

I did not read the first book but this was a very creepy book all by itself. Dale Stewart is a college professor whose marriage is almost non-existent and has lost his job. He thinks that returning to his home town to discover where his lost memories from the summer of his eleventh year, maybe just the thing he needs to help him get things straight in his head. Upon his return on Halloween night to Elm Haven he feels that things aren't quite right but he can't put his finger on what. Soon he encounters Hell Hounds, crazy local skin heads who want to kill him, a haunted farmhouse, a computer that leaves him cryptic messages and the fear that he is actually loosing his mind.

This was a great, mystery thriller that was fast paced and kept my attention from start to finish.

The book starts out promising and the first chapters seem to foreshadow A Big Reveal coming up. Then (almost) nothing happens and some of the hints from the beginning completely fizzle out. It's absolutely possible that I completely missed some crucial point or hidden meaning, but I've read quite a few Simmons novels and never felt like that was the case before.

Very skillfully written (it's Dan Simmons, after all), but a bit disappointing.

“All good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.”

Following his divorce and suicide attempt, Dale Stewart moves back to Elm Haven, deciding to live in the house his childhood friend lived in, to work on a new novel.

How, oh how, was this book going to live up to Summer of Night? Spoiler alert - it doesn’t. But that’s okay, because it’s still a very enjoyable and chilling tale!

I would NOT read this one before Summer of Night, it’s spoiler city in there! It’s not a direct sequel, but more of a chance to revisit Elm Haven and some of the characters we know and love. The story focuses on Dale, but we sometimes have narration from another member of the bike gang and these were often my favourite parts of the book - they were so beautifully written, as I have come to expect from Simmons.

It’s quite sexual at times, which was fine until I was reading it on a plane and I was basically trying to cover the pages from the stranger beside me (ahaha, my phone just autocorrected that to a title since I talk about the Ann Rule book so much). Some of his descriptions of nipples and... other parts... had me rolling my eyes, but it wasn’t too bothersome!

There’s also a lot of references to different authors and works which I LOVED - little shoutouts to King, Nabokov, Arthur Miller etc. And some parts were really quite unsettling and claustrophobic. There’s just something about creepy occurrences in a house - because I too live in a house! This could happen TO ME (I hope it doesn’t).

A Winter Haunting is a lot more direct and to the point than SoN (and Carrion Comfort for that matter), as this one is just over 300 pages long, compared to the larger, and more detailed, novels. My eyes did glaze over during a car chase scene though... good god, how many pages can you dedicate to something like this?! Wrap it up! And one of the characters, Clare, was quite pretentious and unlikeable - but otherwise I have nothing else negative to say about this one!

A really intriguing read with lots of interesting mythology that kept me guessing until the very end! 4 stars.

Well, I decided to read Dan Simmons "A Winter Haunting" because I'm a big Stephen King fan, and I want to branch out into other horror authors. I don't think Dan Simmons is what I'm looking for, though. My big problem with the book is that his writing style is so self-conscious and affected. Like the way he always calls the character Clare: "Clare Hart (Clare Two Hearts)" as if we don't remember 5 pages ago when he wrote that she had changed her name from Clare Two Hearts to Clare Hart. Even in the last quarter of the book when we've known this character for 200 pages he's still calling her Clare Hart at the beginning of each chapter. Give me a break. So, Dan Simmons is crossed off my "potential new favorite horror author" list. Oh, well.

Ако си падате по истории с призраци, книгата може и да ви допадне, макар за мен да не беше много интересна. Действието се забързва чак към края, като през останалото време се чудиш дали героят не е шизофреник. Трудно се разграничава реалното от нереалното, но накрая всичко става ясно.
Писателят на романи Дейл решава да напише нова книга за детството си и се завръща в родното си място. Градчето е вече западнало, повечето къщи са празни, а той отсяда под наем във Веселата къща, домът на Дуейн, който е бил убит от комбайн през 1960 г. на 12-годишна възраст. Странна къща, странни черни кучета, странен шериф, който е бил побойникът навремето и момиче, което всички са харесвали онова лято. Отделно скинъри преследват писателя, а на втория етаж на къщата се чуват необичайни шумове и се виждат светлини. Каква е връзката с Дейл и какво всъщност е станало през онова далечно лято на 1960 г.? Очакват ви шокираща развръзка и покачване на адреналина в последните глави от книгата.
Оценката ми е между 3 и 4.

Loved it. Was actually compelled to write my first review of a book ever when I closed it earlier today. Is it "Summer of Night"? Nope. I thoroughly enjoyed that book as well, but for different reasons. The prequel was nostalgic, adventurous, and scarier with a wide-eyed innocence. In this one, Simmons strips off any sentimentality (from this story or "Summer"). Duane, the narrator now actually "shakes his head" at the wistfulness of the first story--which is interesting given what we find out of "Summer of Night"'s creation in this story.

This story is bleak. If you're read "The Terror", you know how hopeless Simmons's pages can be. It's hard to watch Dale, once a carefree, light-hearted, and decent boy become a depressed, suicide-contemplating adulterer. It's brutal as well. We get to see C.J. Congden all grown up--having devolved into more of a bully--and Michelle Staffney, the sixth grade crush who's worse for the wear as well.

But the story also speaks to a friendship that spans, in many ways, the chasm of death. It certainly has it's creepy moments, but I didn't find it incredibly scary. I would say more interesting. I found it entertaining, but I suppose I was more impressed with the writing, the development of the story--specifically how things were wrapped up--more than anything. All in all a fantastic read.

SPOILERS

Just some things I appreciated about the book:

I liked the theme of birth/death throughout the book. Dale's marriage was dying, then he found "life", in an affair. But that brought death and even fascinations on Dale's part of making that a physical reality for his ex-lover. Then there are the sheets Dale cut and squeezed through upstairs (birth), ironically, to go kill himself. When that didn't work, he emerged from the underground bootleggers' tunnel, squeezing himself through again, only to find C.J. Congden waiting to kill him.

Also, the "melding" of C.J. Congden and the skinhead leader (evil) was juxtaposed with the melding of Dale and Duane (good).

The irony of the black dogs "surrounding" Dale throughout the book. How they started out as little, insignificant, but actually grew in proportion to Dale's own depression and thoughts of suicide. What he was terrified of was actually sent there to guard him from going over that great divide. Also, the fact that Duane's old notes served as the "spell" Dale shouted, at which point the dogs attacked the skin heads.

I appreciated how Duane came through in the end, relentlessly steering Dale toward hope, restoration with his family, etc. After 40 years he was still loyal to Dale.

How Dale wasn't quite as loony as we were lead to believe. Many of the things he saw were probably, in some sense, real. The ghosts of Michelle Staffney and C.J. Congden? C.J. had raped her in the house he was staying in, so they left a world of bad mojo in that place. And also, in some sense, they both still wanted something in the real world. The dogs? Already mentioned those. The random typing? Duane obviously. So, things were not all lost on Dale and in many ways he got caught up in a whirlwind of spiritual activity from the past.

I found the last chapter (after all the previous bleakness and every indication that Dale would die) to be incredibly redemptive. Top notch novel.