Cold on the Mountain by Daniel Powell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a solid little horror novel that feels more like an expanded short story. There are no side plots or other distractions here, just a Point A to Point B story about a family that takes a shortcut in the Sierra Nevada mountains that leads them into the small town of Adrienne, a place where evil gathers (literally, all the bad people of the world end up here after they die).
As part of the contingent of “normals” that blunder into Adrienne, Phil and Wendy Benson are forced to work for the “dark ones” to earn a chance for a once-a-year lottery that sees a bunch of people, both good and bad, released back into the world via magic portal. Adrienne is host to demons, serial killers, Joseph Goebbels (“Call me Joseph”) and the teenage Columbine killers who are never mentioned by name and are weirdly depicted as cartoonish villains.
There is some nice tension as the family struggles to both follow the rules and sometimes defy them, knowing the dire consequences of being caught, but the story is almost too efficient as it speeds along to the endgame, the various pieces all falling in place so quickly there is little time to allow events to sink in. The reader learns about Adrienne but it only ever feels like the surface is examined.
Phil, the protagonist of the story, comes across as a decent but ultimately bland kind of everyman. Bo, his brother on the other side, leads a search to find him and his family, and at one point he and his girlfriend come to believe it’s essential to get the local sheriff on-board to make their kooky plan to free the normals of Adrienne work, though it’s never stated exactly why he’s needed. The sheriff is nice enough as a character, but he becomes increasingly non-essential as the story progresses, to the point where I almost felt his alleged need was a deliberate red herring.
The conclusion will likely leave a lot of readers with a “What happened next?” feeling but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Overall, Cold on the Mountain has a comfortable old school horror feel to it. The journey is brisk–perhaps too much so–but the action certainly keeps rolling along.