Horror in the Winter

MadsPLP

MadsPLP

Grimscribe
With snow in Denmark, even in Copenhagen, one can actually feel that it is winter. This leads me to the subject of horror stories, where that feeling of winter - or winter in itself - is present, where the dominant feeling, the dominant emotion is that of winter (possibly eternal winter), stories written both by Ligotti and other horror/weird writers.
I am not at present at home in my room (my library), som when I list these stories it is from the top of my head. Maybe winter is not even present in the story, except as a cluster of emotions I feel is related both to the story and the season. That is, I may be wrong in listing a story as a winter story in the sense that no winter is actually present in the story. Still, the sense is there. Snow, ice, etc. is also allowed - sometimes the winter is merely present as snow and ice, such as in "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" by Poe. Sometimes, the backdrop of winter is enough for me to suggest that sense of alienation, of everything being literally frozen which the concept of winter instills in me.


Anyway, what springs to my mind are these:

Thomas Ligotti:
- A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing (possibly the whole In a Foreign Land...-suite)
- The Town Manager
- The Bungalow House
- Teatro Grottesco
- The Last Feast of Harlequin
- The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise
- The Troubles of Dr. Thoss
- The Bungalow House (is an icy bleakness enough? I think so.)

Lovecraft:
- At the Mountains of Madness

Poe:
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Mark Samuels:
- The Search for Kruptos

Algernon Blackwood:
- The Glamour of the Snow
- The Wendigo

Quentin S. Crisp:
- Far-off Things

Robert Aickman:
- Your Tiny Hand is Frozen

T.E.D. Klein:
- Petey

Walter de la Mare:
- Crewe

Reggie Oliver (/ M.R. James):
- The Game of Bear


There are probably many more; I feel confident more Blackwood, Aickman and quite many M.R. James stories have that wintry feeling; as I've already written, this is merely from the top of my head.

Any suggestions for horror in the wintertime?
 
Hmm

Ramsey Campbell -
The Midnight Sun

M.R. James -
The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral*

Elizabeth Gaskell -
The Old Nurse's Story

Mark Valentine -
The Last Archipelago

*Possibley not aplicable - more of a feeling of winter gales and storms than blizzards.
 
Fumes-by Stefan Grabinski, will send a chill down your spine. Something about many of his tales seem so perfect for winter, and that one comes to mind right away, with the winter cold and the feeling of alienation being another character in the story, essentially, something not uncommon in his tales. His seemingly supernatural obsession with machinery and industry, so to speak, (specifically trains) also seems to add to the cold, tense and ominous aesthetic of his writing. The Motion Demon and The Dark Domain both have stories that just seem inherently perfect for winter reading. I am sure being immersed in the cold, gray and protracted winters of eastern europe contribute to that element of his works as well as other writers from the region. I know for me, my mindset is significantly different in winter, and what appeals to me varies greatly with the seasons. For entirely different reasons, some of Reggie Oliver's works tend to be favorites to read in the winter, but I think that has more to do to the fact that I was introduced to his work in the winter and became enamored with it then. I have opened Symphonies each Christmas Eve for the past several years and plan to do so this upcoming Christmas Eve as well. A Christmas Card, a finely written tale indeed, is one that instantly comes to mind, for obvious reasons. It really showcases Oliver's polished, extremely refined and stylized prose. Kafka is another writer that I tend to gravitate toward during the winter months.
 
Mention should be made of The Shining by Stephen King, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, and The Ithaqua Cycle: The Wind-Walker of the Icy Wastes: 14 Tales edited by Robert M. Price. I'm certain other titles will spring (no pun intended) to mind.
 
Ahhh. The Shining is one of my favorite books ever, and is an artifact of my early obsession with Stephen King as a young man who read all of his "major" works. It really is one of his finer novels, and as cool as the film adaptation is, it varies greatly when compared to the book. Stephen King, from what I remember, simply accepted that this would be the case when he sold the rights to the story for the film adaptation. If I recall, he was quite disappointed with the film in that he felt as though it strayed too much. I suppose that's to be expected. If you think about the vision a writer has when he constructs a novel and all the work that such an endeavor entails, compared to how trimmed, edited and altered screenplays tend to be by comparison, one might imagine that faithfulness to the original story is inherently difficult, at least in the eyes of the originator of the story. I also don't think Kubrick was too interested in what King had to say about it and had his own designs on the film, but that's the way the cookie crumbles, as they say, and is all water under the bridge.
(says Tim who is clearly metaphor-happy today;))
 
James Joyce's "The Dead" probably isn't a horror story. It's been years since I read it, and I barely remember it. Like the other stories in Dubliners, I found it rather boring, which probably says more about me than it does about Joyce's stories. But the last paragraph of "The Dead" memorably expresses a quiet, wintry horror.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
​
 
I forgot one that is a sleeper, but one that I consider to be one of Tom's best pieces; Premature Communication from Sideshow and Other Stories. It is absolutely required Ligottian reading for the winter, perhaps best read on a snowy day after ingesting some sort of mind-altering compound. It is only 2 pages long, yet I feel as though it is a highly underrated, often overlooked hidden-gem, and one of his most effective stories to date. It is a masterpiece of atmosphere and has an odd, other-worldly quality that is quite mesmerizing. I appeal to anyone not familiar with this short, short story to read it and see if you don't agree. A remarkably satisfying story that, in some ways, displays what a master of the short, weird tale is capable of pulling off in two pages of text. I'll be reading it and Sideshow tonight in honor of the mention.
As a side-note, I created an audio file of me reading this story, and when I find it, perhaps I'll post it somewhere here.
 
To the stories already mentioned in this thread I’d like to add “The Night-Doings at ‘Deadman’s’” by Ambrose Bierce. The opening paragraph is shiver-inducing:

It was a singularly sharp night, and clear as the heart of a diamond. Clear nights have a trick of being keen. In darkness you may be cold and not know it; when you see, you suffer. This night was bright enough to bite like a serpent. The moon was moving mysteriously along behind the giant pines crowning the South Mountain, striking a cold sparkle from the crusted snow, and bringing out against the black west the ghostly outlines of the Coast Range, beyond which lay the invisible Pacific. The snow had piled itself, in the open spaces along the bottom of the gulch, into long ridges that seemed to heave, and into hills that appeared to toss and scatter spray. The spray was sunlight, twice reflected: dashed once from the moon, once from the snow.
 
To add a few of my own wintry favorites not yet mentioned by others:

H.P. Lovecraft:
-The Festival (This one is important to me--I've reread it the week before Christmas or so for the past few years, and will be doing so again this year).

Thomas Ligotti:
-Death Without End

Richard Gavin:
-Down Among the Relics

Michael Cisco:
-The Ice Age of Dreams

Simon Strantzas:
-Cold to the Touch
-The Uninvited Guest
-Like Falling Snow
 
Ascrobius said:
I forgot one that is a sleeper, but one that I consider to be one of Tom's best pieces; Premature Communication from Sideshow and Other Stories.
Click to expand...

Rereading Ligotti's two-page masterpiece just now reminded me of another wintry weird tale featuring a child protagonist, Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow." The story, written in the voluptuous prose one would expect from a poet of Aiken's ability, follows an introspective twelve-year-old boy as he becomes more and more remote from the people around him; very gradually the reader comes to understand that the boy is developing schizophrenia.
 
John W. Campbell - "Who Goes There?"
Algernon Blackwood - "the Wendigo" and "the Glamour of the Snow"
Russel Banks - affliction
Albert Sanchez Pinol - Cold Skin
Peter Straub - Ghost Story
 
Here's a couple more:

Surly Sullen Bell by Russell Kirk
White by Tim Lebbon
The Phantom Coach by Amelia B. Edwards
The Captain of the Pole-Star by A. Conan Doyle
The Close at Chadminster by Steve Duffy

Novel:
Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell (just one chapter, but rather memorable)
Terror by Dan Simmons (a winter must-read)
The Lost by Jonathan Aycliffe

When it comes to poetry I recommend Bacovia.

So many great titles have already been mentioned, these are the only ones I can think of at the moment.
 
Now that so many novels have been mentioned, it would be a terrible shame—or sin, even—if we neglected to add Frost by Thomas Bernhard. That potential catastrophe is hereby avoided.
 
yellowish haze said:
The Phantom Coach by Amelia B. Edwards
The Captain of the Pole-Star by A. Conan Doyle
The Close at Chadminster by Steve Duffy
Click to expand...

If we are going boreal & anti-boreal then I must toss in Endless Night by Barbara Roden. There is also a very wintery passage on the third page of Mark Samuels The White Hand.

I haven't actually read it but I seem to recall Nat. Hawthorne had a tale called The Snow Image. Sounds a likely suspect to me.

EDIT: Going even more polar I throw in To Clear the Earth and Black Fire, both by Will Murray.

MORE EDIT: The begining of The Novel of The Black Seal has a superb wintery bit were the protagonist describes a nightmarish wander through the icy London streets.

The Coming of The White Worm by Clark Ashton Smith
 
A classic of wintry weirdness is E. F. Benson's "The Horror-Horn." Benson's tales are often deeply unsettling due to the contradictory nature of his material: beneath the polite conventions and the drawing room manners there lurks a demon of sexual perversity. In "The Horror-Horn" we encounter a race of creatures who live amongst the frozen rocks and snowy wastes: "things human in shape, and covered, except for the face and hands, with long black hair. They were dwarfs in size, four feet high or thereabouts, but of prodigious strength and agility, remnants of some wild primeval race. It seemed that they were still in an upward stage of evolution, or so I guessed, for the story ran that sometimes girls had been carried off by them, not as prey, and not for any such fate as for those captured by cannibals, but to be bred from. Young men also had been raped by them, to be mated with the females of their tribe. All this looked as if the creatures, as I said, were tending towards humanity."
 
Tom's vignette "Autumnal" is one of the greatest distilled fall pieces. Though I wonder if the creeping iciness at the end qualifies it as winter horror? The imagery of an "eternal winter" is very striking:

"And we are always dreaming of the day when all the fires of summer are defunct, when everyone like a shriveled leaf sinks into the cooling ground of a sunless earth, and when even the colors of autumn have withered for the last time, dissolving into the desolate whiteness of an eternal winter."
 
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