Clare remembers the cold. She remembers abandoned cars and children’s toys littered across the road. She remembers dark shapes in the snow and a terror she can’t explain. And then…nothing.
When she wakes, aching and afraid in a stranger’s gothic home, he tells her she was in an accident. He claims he saved her. Clare wants to leave, but a vicious snowstorm has blanketed the world in white, trapping them together, and there’s nothing she can do but wait.
At least the stranger seems kind…but Clare doesn’t know if she can trust him. He promised they were alone here, but she sees and hears things that convince her something else is creeping about the surrounding woods, watching. Waiting. Between the claustrophobic storm and the inescapable sense of being hunted, Clare is on edge…and increasingly certain of one thing:
Her car crash wasn’t an accident. Something is waiting for her to step outside the fragile safety of the house… something monstrous, something unfeeling.
Something desperately hungry.
Voices in the Snow by Darcy Coates. Book #1 in the Black Winter trilogy. Kindle edition, 352 pages. Published by Black Owl Books, November 2019.
Darcy is one of my new favorite authors to read right now. She has several books under her belt and I haven’t read a bad (or even meh) one yet. I only just discovered her… last year, maybe? I had first picked up a few of her books through Amazon’s kindle deals and freebies of the day sort of thing. And then one of the Goodreads horror groups I’m in picked a book from her to do a group read with her newest book (at that time Craven Manor). I absolutely loved that book, her writing style and creativity of her plot. I immediately began to pick up her other books to read.
Along comes Voices in the Snow. I flew through this book. Super hard to put down. It has a great opening! Clare is rushing to get to her aunt’s house because there is an emergency. She is on the phone with her sister, who is frantically trying to tell Clare to turn around because the emergency is getting worse. BUT the phone call is cutting out and we don’t get to hear what Clare’s sister is telling her about the emergency. What is happening? We don’t know! Clare crashes the car and is injured, leading to not being able to recall what she had been doing that day or what was going on. OMFG what IS it!? I HAD to know what was going on!
Darcy is truly a genius with modern gothic stories. I was pleasantly surprised that this was not a typical haunted house story (Darcy’s stories rarely are!), and that there are other monsters afoot and maybe an apocalyptic theme as well? 😮 Not sure on that last part, I’ll have to wait and see what the next few books reveal… OMG can they hurry up and come out already? O__O It is killing me having to wait until late fall of 2020 for the next book!
The setting is very unnerving. The way the house and land is described it felt like another main character. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be snowed at that sort of house. Even without anything supernatural going on, it just seems super disturbing. You can feel the isolation, decay and despair radiating from it. That is the indescribable feeling raising the hair on the back of your neck and giving you goose bumps. Fantastic atmosphere. Definitely one of the creepiest buildings I’ve seen in fiction in a long time.
I love the characters Clare and Dorran. You feel bad for Clare because she desperately wants to get back to her family and make sure they are safe from whatever is going on. You feel bad for Dorran because of how horrible his life has been (if he is telling the truth!). Geez! Poor guy is like a kicked puppy. Someone give the man a hug already! D: There is this great tension throughout the book between these two characters because Clare is a stranger in a strange house and we don’t know if Dorran can be trusted or not. Is he lying about anything? Him helping a stranger just sounds too good to be true, right? What’s the catch? Hmm…
I love the premise. I don’t fully know what is going on (SO MANY QUESTIONS for book 2!!), but I’m all in! I love trying to figure out what is going on and how they are going to survive. I don’t want to give too much away about what happens in the story, but, I love the creative spin on this … whatever it is. Is it zombies? Ghosts? Mutants? Aliens? Natural disaster? Asteroid? World War III nucluar fallout? Virus? All of the above?? I have no clue… but I’m loving it! It has been extremely fun so far. I am literally counting down the days until the second book comes out. AGH!! I can’t wait!!! D:
Even though we don’t fully know what is going on, we do know a few things… mainly that there are THINGS out in the woods that surround the house. And they are trying to get in. I love the way these things look and move. Very interesting. Very creepy. I’m glad I’m not having to deal with these things!
I loved this book. The only thing that I can even sort of complain about is that sometimes Clare was kinda dumb and it drove me NUTS! She thinks there is an intruder breaking into the house, so she goes wandering off- ALONE– to go check on it. In a house that isn’t even hers. So she doesn’t really know the layout! OMFG Clare! Have you NEVER seen a horror movie before?? You NEVER go anywhere by YOURSELF!! That is the fastest way to to die or get kidnapped! DUH! It doesn’t hurt my rating for the book, but it did make me face palm a lot!
This was an extremely entertaining book and I cant wait to finish the series!
Creature From The Book Lagoon 