The Final Winter by Iain Rob Wright
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I bought this on amazon for three reasons:
1. It was short and I wasn’t in the mood for a 1,000 page epic.
2. It was cheap. Cheap is always a good price.
3. I’m a sucker for apocalypse stories, especially ones that aren’t the start of a 20 volume series.
3a. I like to give a few untried authors a shot every year.
The Final Winter or as I like to call it, The Final Winter Where Every Character Shares Every Thought They Have with the Reader starts out with some measure of promise. A small assortment of people are effectively trapped in an English pub as an apocalyptic snowstorm rages not only outside but all across the world. Shortly into the story all phone service goes down and the power flicks off, leaving the group of people completely isolated.
A few others from a nearby supermarket and video store make their way over and the rest of the short novel chronicles the group trying to survive the storm and each other because most of them are miserable wretches.
The ending is right up there with “it was all a dream” or “and it turns out they were Adam and Eve”. It’s hokey as all get-out.
Overall, this is a mediocre effort, hampered by a few things that feel very “new writer” to me:
- Each scene is told from a particular character’s point of view. This is fine. However, the author doesn’t merely jump into each character’s head, he snuggles comfortably in. Every thought and emotion is relayed in explicit (and often redundant) detail. There is no mystery at all behind anyone’s motivations at any point. Everything is quite literally spelled out for the reader. This gives the story a strange flatness, leeching out nearly all of the inter-character drama.
- The plot drives the characters. The author seems to have hatched the plot for the novel and then contorts the situations and characters to ensure that everything moves from Point A to Point B to Point C. There are absurd coincidences, characters behaving stupidly (often wondering to themselves why they are acting so stupidly but carrying on nonetheless), all in service to keep the plot moving forward. The characters feel less like people and more like chess pieces being moved about to get to checkmate. That’s what the bad guy should have shouted at the end, really. “Checkmate!”
- Without getting too much into spoilers, the depiction of good and evil flips between cartoonish and grimdark, but the tone shifts are awkward, as if the author couldn’t make up his mind whether to play things straight or for laughs.
The opening where the characters are first introduced and the mystery of the storm is not yet revealed works reasonably well and I was interested in seeing what would happen. By the end I was rolling my eyes regularly and happier about the book being short and cheap.
A disappointment overall and one I can’t recommend. If you’re looking for an apocalyptic tale I’d suggest the nearly 40 year old Lucifer’s Hammer before this.
