Customer Reviews

Blood and Ice

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(48)
3 star:		(28)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

From the bare synopsis, I thought this might be something like "The Da Vinci Code" in the South Pole. I quickly realized that was not the case. It's a little more like the way Clive Cussler uses a historical incident to launch each thriller, except that here, the historical incident is less frenetically paced, and occupies more of the book than the opening teaser.

The historical part of the book is more or less the love story between the dashing Lt. Sinclair Copley and nurse Eleanor Ames during the Crimean War. Oddly, however, the book opens with the two of them being chained up and thrown off a boat to drown in icy waters. It's later chapters that tell the story of how they got together.

The modern part of the story is about a photojournalist's trip to a research station at the South Pole, where he makes an . . . interesting discovery. The atmosphere is not unlike that in John Carpenter's "The Thing," minus of course the gory special effects.

It's really hard to say more without spoiling the plot of the book, so I won't. What I will say is that the plot twists are both predictable yet subtle, if that makes sense. In other words, the careful (or prolific) reader will have figured out what's going on before the reveal, but it's still satisfying all the same.

It's 1856 and Sinclair Copley and Eleanor Ames are aboard the HM Brig Coventry in the Southern Ocean. Eleanor is ill. The ship has been blown off coarse and the superstitious sailors blame the passengers. When they find out what Eleanor's medicine really is, they wrap the pair in chains and toss them into the cold, cold ocean.

In the present day the love of Michael Wilde's life lies in a coma, the victim of a climbing accident. Michael is awash in depression, which leads him to accepting a job in Antarctica, where while on a dive one day to photograph marine life he comes across two bodies encased in ice. The frozen couple seem almost alive. They're wrapped in chains. How'd they get there? Accident? Murder?

Michael and crew bring the bodies up and wait for them to thaw out, but they disappear and a couple of the crew are murdered. Who did it? This the survivors need to know. Plus, where are the dead from the deep? These questions will grip you as the book moves between time and place, telling us both Sinclair and Eleanor's story and Michael's as well. There is horror afoot in Antarctica, but it didn't originate there.

This is a story peopled with characters easy to identify with. It's moody, frightening, gripping and spellbinding.

It may sound odd to ask a science fiction adventure novel to be believable, but this complaint has less to do with the suspension of disbelief one accords to a mixed vampire/techno genre and more to do with the characters, their depth and ultimately their motives. A few examples...SPOILER ALERT...The station head decides not to alert anyone in authority to the startling discovery, or to the mayhem and loss of personnel in order to avoid tangling with the bureaucracy. They won't notice that people don't come back? Huh? A bereaved widow, meeting what she thinks is her husband's casket is informed by a man she has never met that instead he is smuggling a live person into the country, but that her husband is in fact dead. No problem. Metronomic, paint-by-numbers flashbacks which have little relevance to character development or plot; depthless characters and lumbering, expository prose. You want vampires, science fiction? There are many way better choices.

Touted in the product review as being a "supernatural thriller", Masello's "Blood and Ice" explores territory Stephen King covered much more effectively and spookily in "'Salem's Lot" among other novels.

Sinclair Copley and Eleanor Ames - lovers in 19th Century England - are hurled into the icy seas from a sailing ship in Antarctic waters. Michael Wilde is a 21st Century journalist visiting a research station near the South Pole to write an article for an ecology publication. Michael discovers the bodies in a block of ice, and the tale moves forward from there. You can read the Amazon product description for a fuller synopsis.

Where, oh where, to begin?

First and foremost, as mentioned earlier, this book just never manages to build up any dramatic tension at all. None. Maybe, given Masello's background as a screenwriter, he heard dramatic background music in his head while writing this, and thought it would convey itself in the pages of the story. It doesn't (though it's badly needed).

Compounding this problem is the way the 19th Century story of the lovers is intertwined with the 21st Century story of Michael. The 19th Century story is given WAY too much space, and reads more like a Harlequin Romance bodice-ripper than anything else. The 21st Century story was somewhat interesting, though not compelling in any way; more as an insight into life in the frozen wastes.

After plodding through over 2/3 of this tome, we finally reach the point where the conflict between the lovers and the Antarctic scientists starts evidencing itself, and again there's no real sense of danger, because by this time we've established that in spite of their "affliction" Sinclair and Eleanor are pretty sympathetic characters. Yes, a couple of people end up dying, but these events are portrayed as being more on the level of unfortunate accidents than anything else; the unavoidable byproduct of their "condition".

It's kinda like Rhett and Scarlet accidentally causing a traffic pileup and a couple of people dying. Gee, that's sad, but what are you gonna do? Bummer.

For this kind of book to be successful, there has to be some malevolent evil somewhere. Again, think of King's "The Shining". The central characters were all good people who were overcome, through no fault of their own, by a malevolent supernatural force. Now THAT'S a "thriller"!

Two stars, for the somewhat interesting look at Antarctic life. I think that's generous.

I'm not getting into too much of the plot, since there's a bit of a surprise about halfway through that is pretty great, but I will say you have to be patient getting there.

The first half of the book alternates two stories with its chapters, one part is a romance between a soldier and a nurse in England in the 1800's, that part is pretty cool, and I found the characters interesting.

The other part is about a photojournalists trip to the South Pole. While I imagine the description of life on the South Pole is fairly accurate, it was also fairly boring to read. So for the first half the book, I kept wondering, "where is this going, they keep going back and forth between past and present and the present stuff is kinda boring. Whats the point."

Then, halfway through, the plot takes a turn that I really didn't see coming, and I couldn't put the book down.

I won't spoil it, but it was a fun, fast read after that. Ending could've used some work, but if you're patient, you'll enjoy this book.

Some perspective: I do not read a lot. So when I do, it better be fairly good to keep my attention. Well, Blood and Ice did keep my attention.

The book is written from an historical perspective and a current one. I think character development was done well and was believable, especially the young couple. I personally thought as I read it that it jumped around a lot and was hard to follow, but once I finished it, it seemed to all flow together. Being set in Antarctica was sort of something new and not done very often. Though it is a place of ice and cold, so not much to describe in a way.

Like I said, I do not read much, but Blood and Ice did capture my interest all the way through.

If you like your horror-fantasy fiction to be mild in flavour and benevolent in tone, then this could very well be a story for you. The setting at a research station in Antarctica has led many commentators to remark on its obvious parallel with the two successive films called The Thing. Despite this strong resemblance, the book reminds me more of Salem's Lot, but with one crucial difference. The ending of Salem's Lot is bleak and desperate, with only a forlorn prayer left by way of hope, whereas Blood and Ice ends on a note that is something near upbeat, even if you may have difficulty in finding this turn of the narrative completely convincing.

Another significant point about Blood and Ice is that it is extremely reader-friendly. There are about 500 pages of it, but the style of writing is so easy and effortless that the book never seems in danger of being over-long. Not only that, it is written in good English from start to finish, and I wish that were a compliment I could pay to more authors.

If any of that makes the book sound possibly just a little bit bland, well then I suppose, really, that it is just a little bit bland. For me, the most exciting narration in it was the voyage of the icebreaker right at the start. Once that was over, I never worked up more than mild interest in, say, the discovery of the submarine zombies or Sinclair's final battle. Again, the plot is coherent and very simple to follow, but it is just a touch predictable. Predictable, that is, until the very end, when `predictable' gives way to `incredible'. The relaxed storytelling manner is a good thing in general too, but a bit of tightening up would not have come amiss. For one thing the icebreaker episode breaks away like one of its own floes with a complete cast of characters on board; and the whole repeated emphasis on Kristin, which is obviously intended to parallel the tale of Eleanor somehow, seems to me just intrusive and no real parallel at all.

One has the feeling that the author must be a rather pleasant sort of guy. His `horror' effects are entirely lacking in sadism, and that is not because he can't write vividly about real-life horror when he wants to. He makes his own feelings clear when talking about whaling, about seal-culls and about hospital conditions in Florence Nightingale's Crimea. His feelings are very much like my own feelings in these respects, but I wonder what sort of reader it would take not to be touched by the little vignette of Michael and the abandoned skua chick. At intervals through the book there are snippets from the Ancient Mariner. Harking back again to the way Salem's Lot ends, with a near-hopeless prayer, I recalled Coleridge's conclusion to that colossal masterpiece

`He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small'.

The poet's religious moment leads me myself to end by going off at a tangent - why on earth has Robert Masello elected to name the head of operations in his Antarctic station after the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster?

This was a wonderful summer read. The book is written in the 2 timeline style -where each set of characters is described in alternating chapters, and each series of events occurs in another time and place. As the book progresses, and excitement builds, eventually the timelines merge into one.

In my opinion there were three things that set this book above and apart from many similar novels flooding the market today:

First, I thought the author developed the characters in a way that complemented the story rather well, and the secondary characters made the book even more interesting. I never went "are you kidding me? this is just like any other dime a dozen novel, where the characters exist for no other reason than to push the plot along, or provide false leads..."

Second, I really liked the two main settings of the book. One is during the historical period of the Crimean War (which I knew very little about prior to reading this book), and the other is modern day Antarctica. To my untrained eyes, both scenes seemed 'relatively ' realistic and the author provided a wonderful immersion experience in each. It is a testament to the interest I felt when reading that I immediately researched both areas more on my own after completing the book.

Third, I was consistently engaged as the book continued to progress in a different way than I thought it would. I kept thinking "ok, here it comes... in this type of novel, these situations usually are resolved this way", and when they weren't, I thought "well, this is turning out in a more interesting/realistic way than I thought".

It is a credit to the book that I never lost interest and I kept turning the pages to see how the timelines would merge and how everything would get resolved. I never felt like I "had" to keep reading... instead, I "wanted" to keep reading.

My only complaint, and what kept me from giving it 5 stars was that the ending seemed rather abrupt, and it left a lot of interesting points that could have been further developed -kind of like when a good movie ends and you go "wow, I wish they had talked more about the implications of X." Had that been improved or expanded I would probably have thought "wow, this book was FANTASTIC!". Instead, I will leave it as "hey, this book was a wonderful summer read, and I am glad I traded my money for the enjoyment that this book provided me..." Worth it.

The story drags with many chapters dedicated to a past "love story" that is really unrelated, aside from the fact that the characters are the ones who end up under the antarctic ice. The author takes forever to get to the point.

The modern day story is much the same, with a main character that is really uninteresting and who has suffered a personal tragedy with which I, personally, never felt any connection.

So, what does this leave? A story that wanders aimlessly from past to present with no real anchor to keep interest. And, in the end, I was disappointed with the outcome. I didn't anticipate a vampire story, though I'm sure it was probably mentioned in a review, I never saw it.

I read it. It wasn't horrible. It wasn't great. It just was. I can't say this is a good diversion, there are many better books that can take up a few hours of your time. Personally, I recommend skipping this one.

I have been a fan since Vigil, but like always I find Robert Masello to be a bit predictable, even in the parts of his story that are supposed to be unpredictable. It will keep you reading, it did me, but it's a story where it can have one of two or three endings, and though its interesting to see how it's going to end, it's not a mystery. It's a, "Yes, I thought so moment," Instead of, "I never saw that coming."

But this is not to say it is a bad book. It certainly isn't. It is fun and entertaining read. A good mystery, a unique thriller, and an interesting plot. Michael Wilde, a journalist, needs to escape the pains in his life, and with a hope to start anew, goes to the South Pole (not something you hear often in a story). The story then begins to take wild turns from studies of the Crimean wars, to studies of the Antartic Ocean. It is a fun, quick read, you can get through in a few days, and enjoy the ride.

It's not great, definitely not perfect, and I don't know if its worth the buy or not. I guess it depends on you. For me, I think you might want to wait for it to come out in paperback, but then that's just me. I would suggest reading Vigil, and if you like that, then Bestiary first, so if you're not as much a fan of htis work, you'll know he can be much better.