A Cold Season [Paperback]

Cass after losing her soldier in Afghanistan up sticks and moves herself and her young son to a rural village she lived in briefly as a child. Her son has been withdrawn since his Fathers death and she thinks a countryside setting and a new start will help him recover. All is not what it seems though, the locals are either overly friendly or outright hostile, the school has a new headteacher who seems almost too good to be true and soon her sons behaviour evolves from distant into something much more sinister.

First the good- The author subtlety builds the feeling of claustrophobia and isolation rather than hitting is over the head with it. The writing is excellent in this respect, writers of this sort of occult story often don't trust their reader to see the implications of their protagonists situation so this was a pleasant surprise. The heroines sons increasingly disturbing behaviour is taken, by his Mother, to be grief, some reviewers have complained about this however I think that it was believable if we bear in mind that she too has been through a terrible loss and therefore is not entirely herself. I thought this was a clever plot device used well by an adept author.

Now the bad, and cripes is it bad.- The end. I can't help but feel that there was a deadline looming here. So much happens in the last couple of chapters, a whole other dimension is added to the plot, two characters suddenly appear with little explanation and the big finale happens all in the space of 40 or so pages. It's a garbled badly written mess and at the end of it it simply doesn't add up. We had a lot of nice foreshadowing that Casss past played a role in her current situation but it is never properly explained despite being integral to the ending. I don't want everything wrapped up nicely in a bow for me, I love a novel that leaves you to fill in some blanks yourself but I don't think this is case here, it really seems as if the author was in that much of a rush that somehow crucial plot points were culled.

Despite this negative review I would give this author a second chance as there was a lot of promise in this work.

I should declare that I was sent a copy of this book by the publisher. If I hadn't enjoyed it, I wouldn't, though, be reviewing it - Alison Littlewood's first novel is an assured piece of horror writing.

At one level, it is a simple story - Cass and her son Ben are newcomers to the remote town of Darnshaw, under Saddleworth Moor. They are soon cut off, snowed in and with no working phone or Internet (crucial for Cass's web design business). The locals are an unfriendly bunch (there is perhaps a hint of Royston Vasey here, with one farmer refusing to sell eggs except to locals - enough to raise a smile but not to break the tension). Something evil is definitely stirring - how will Cass survive as things begin to turn nasty? What can she do to protect her son?

Underneath, though, it's a bit more complicated. Cass has lived in Darnshaw before, indeed, it's where, as a child, her father abandoned her (as she sees it) for the Church. She was never, she thinks, good enough for him. Also missing is Ben's father, Pete - but very much present is the seductive new teacher, Theo Remick, another newcomer to the town, who becomes Cass's ally against the more hostile of the locals. Each of these men has had, or will have, an impact on her, and it is only towards the end of the book that she begins to establish her reality apart from them. Cass's vulnerability comes across very well, as the snow falls and Ben grows into a stranger.

With a story like this there's a danger that because we, as readers, know that something is going on, we become impatient with the protagonist for not twigging what's happening, making plans and facing up to the threat, so losing sympathy with them. There's none of that here. There is a sense of menace from the very start - that journey across the moor - but Littlewood very deftly makes clear that Cass is aware of it but that she attributes her growing unease to her feelings for the missing Pete, to Ben's missing his father, to unhappy childhood memories of Darnshaw, and so on. As a result, she is a very believable, and sympathetic, character.

The book is compelling, with the white, wintry landscape reflecting Cass's increasing emptiness, and it comes to a powerful, though ambiguous, conclusion. By the end we feel that Cass is much more in charge of things - but it's not clear just what she has had to give up to get there, nor exactly how her relationships with those three men who dominated her life will have changed.

I had a definite sense of a sequel coming. I do hope so.

Cass has received the devastating news that her army husband Pete has been lost in Afghanistan. Crushed, she moves with her son Ben to the village of Darnshaw, where she spent some of her youth, to make a fresh start. The isolated nature of the location, reached via Saddleworth Moor, is conveyed very early on in the novel, as Cass is driving towards their new home and the landscape becomes a blur, disorientating, as heavy fog sets in. Already there is an element of tension, and as Cass starts to feel unsettled, so does the reader.

Their new home is to be the renovated Foxdene Mill. Upon arrival it becomes clear that they are the first new inhabitants there; the rest of the complex appears to be unoccupied, with some of it unfinished. As the severe winter weather worsens, so Cass' feeling of isolation in Darnshaw intensifies. Phone lines don't work anymore, no post is coming in or out, and any communications outside of the village are seemingly impossible. Ben is able to attend his new school though, and there Cass meets some other mothers and the new headteacher, Theo Remick. Strange, unnerving events being to occur, and Cass tries to rationalise these, and puts it all down to them being new, to Ben being uprooted, but she sees shocking changes in her son and his behaviour. To go much further into the story may be to reveal plot that is best discovered by readers for themselves.

This is a tense, nervy horror story with some weird goings-on. It's outside the genres of fiction I usually read and beyond my comfort zone but I really wanted to read this one. The isolation, the weird and eerie atmosphere, and the tension, is all built effectively, and the growing fear and uncertainty within Cass is conveyed very well. I was on edge whilst reading parts of this novel, and I didn't want to read it in the dark! There are some grim discoveries and the isolated village and its' inhabitants hold many dark secrets. A lot of the tension is the thought and suggestion of what may happen, or what you imagine might be the case; it's achieved nicely in this author's first novel. The reader needs to be able to suspend disbelief at some of the goings on, and at times I wanted to make Cass act differently, faster somehow. I was compelled to finish it. 3.5/5