Many of the authors who made the Books of Horror Go To List are known primarily for one title and that's the one that gets talked about all the time, even if they've written others. Some of them, on the other hand, have a couple of titles that fought it out for prominence. Last month's choice, Nick Roberts, is one of those, because 'Anathema' is talked about as much as 'The Exorcist's House'. This month's is another, because I could have fairly reviewed 'Brother' instead of 'The Shuddering', both of them frequent mentions in the group. This is the one sitting on my shelf though, so it became my introduction to her work.
The blurb suggests that it's a routine slasher, with a group of friends getting together at a cabin in the woods for a last hurrah before one of them moves to Switzerland. However, you can safely ditch your expectations in that direction because this is really survival horror, with these friends, not the typical bunch of annoying college kids indulging whatever vices traditionally call down the wrath of the human monster in the vicinity, having to face instead more traditional horror foes; mysterious and monstrous creatures in the woods who aim to assuage their hunger on whatever meat they can find, including human beings.
There's nothing new here at all but Ahlborn writes smoothly and elegantly and with a strong focus on character. In other hands, this could easily have been a gore novel, with plenty of opportunity to have these creatures munch down on new throwaway characters in each chapter. In Ahlborn's, it's a character study, her goal to make us care about a limited cast so that she can ratchet up the tension in spotlight scenes that felt very cinematic to me. This isn't a film, to the best of my knowledge, but it reads like it ought to be, almost a novelisation of a movie that doesn't exist.
How successful she is will absolutely depend on how invested you find yourselves in her characters. I appreciated how they weren't either the typical set of college brats or the usual counter to that in an unwieldy collection of people with diverse backgrounds and character quirks chosen deliberately for their differences rather than their similarities. The five core cast members are a traditional set of young, white and mostly privileged characters that you might expect from a seventies novel. I've very little in common with any of them but Ahlborn made me care enough that their deaths meant something.
And that's not really a spoiler. People die in this book but, as there are precious few characters who don't count as one of these core five, you can be sure that we're going to lose some of them. What I appreciated most here was that those deaths didn't always happen when I expected them to. I saw the first one coming from a mile away, but not the next and so that was impactful. What's more, as interpersonal relationships are strong between this group, the loss of a member doesn't just shake up their dynamic; it becomes almost traumatic, for us as well as them.
I guess the lead is Ryan Adler, born to a wealthy family but successful on his own merits. He doesn't like his rich father, but then nobody else does either, likely including his actual girlfriend, an Italian model. Ryan tries not to follow in his footsteps, in any way other than success, and hasn't yet found a girl he might consider sharing more than a brief time with. If that sounds acutely shallow, it isn't really. Ryan knows how privileged he is and certainly enjoys that, but he seems like a decent fellow, even if he has a quick temper.
He's set up this getaway to the family's Colorado cabin, a word that seriously does not do this place justice, because he's going to move to Switzerland to be seen on ski slopes or some such and wants one final snowboarding adventure with the people closest to him before then and before the cabin is sold to someone else. He also wants to connect his twin sister, Jane, with his best friend growing up, Sawyer, because they used to be an item and he feels that they should be again.
Jane is the most sympathetic character because she rejected a life of privilege to teach eight-year-olds. She also admits to herself that she never got over Sawyer, even though she got both married to and divorced from a cheat called Alex. The problem is that, not being aware of Ryan's intentions, Sawyer brought his girlfriend April, who's an immediate fifth wheel from the start. Fortunately, the inclusion of Lauren, a friend of Jane's, works out much better, because there's chemistry between her and Ryan. Both twins are matchmaking.
And so the rich white folk do their rich white folk things, while the creatures gathering outside get hungrier and more desperate. We're never quite told what they are, initially wondering if they're a Colorado take on Bigfoot but gradually realising, as Ahlborn adds more detail, that they're not and don't fit any other cryptid we're generally aware of. I'm assuming that this is because they're there less to reflect a particular monster and more as a class metaphor, their ruthless killing set up as an inevitability for them. They're hungry and the storms are driving their traditional prey into hiding, so they're hunting human beings out of necessity. Their options are to kill and eat or to die.
What's odd here is that most of what I've written thus far wouldn't necessarily prompt me to read this book, but I loved it. The story is simple and straightforward with no background to its monsters. The characters are the beautiful people so don't operate on my level of reality. Their relationships are the heart of the story, rather than any sort of mythological worldbuilding, which I'd have eaten up, if that's not a bad choice of phrase given the context. So why would I get any sort of enjoyment out of this?
Well, that comes down to Ahlborn's writing, because she wrote this smoothly enough that I started to care and that meant that I was rooting for this couple and maybe that one too and when all that started to be threatened, I wanted to do something about it. I can certainly see why some readers don't connect to this at all, because that emotional investment is an absolute must for it to work. If Ahlborn doesn't make you care about these key characters, then there's nothing else here that will take its place for you. The gore isn't gratuitious. The deaths aren't frequent. There are pop culture references but few of them. It's all about the characters and their plight.
If that isn't enough, you're not going to get to the ending, which is a simple but very powerful one in the brutally ironic style of 'The Twilight Zone'. In its way, everything here is simple. Beyond that underlying metaphor, which isn't forced or particularly developed, what we see is what we get. It's the rich and powerful versus monsters and maybe Mother Nature herself. Perhaps Ahlborn's most overt success is that I wasn't on the side of the monsters, even if I sympathised with them.
So I enjoyed this but it's not unusual enough or hard hitting enough to stay with me. Maybe I ought to have started with 'Brother'. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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