Customer Reviews

Frozen Blood

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Tara Stewart is returning home after an absence of many years to attend her father's funeral. But as she returns home she's forced to confront the ghosts of her past, and the ghosts in her head. She is battling with alcoholism and guilt and schizophrenia, and as if that wasn't enough to deal with, it's starting to hail. And as Tara gets closer to her destination, the storm is getting worse.

Written with loving echoes of Stephen King's The Shining and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Sutherland's first novel is a wonderful gothic chiller. Sutherland's most impressive achievement in this book is his characterization. Tara Stewart is the kind of character that sticks with you.

Joel Sutherland's debut novel, Frozen Blood, is a raw sort of thing, rather like a knee freshly scraped on a stubborn patch of ice. As debuts go, it's a strong first effort by an author, and is slick, with only a few of the rough patches one would expect.

In Frozen Blood, a sudden hail storm brings the world to a halt even as the lives of a small group of individuals goes spinning horribly out of control. Ghosts, dementia and bad, black feelings abound as the world ends, both for society, and on a more personal level for the characters.

There are several elements reminiscent of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House in the novel. An unreliable point-of-view character beset by phantoms which, while seemingly real, may just be figments of her deteriorating mental state. In a sense, Frozen Blood is a haunted house story within a natural disaster story, blending elements of both to create something unique. Unique and creepy.

Sutherland effectively creates and sustains that shuddery mood from the get-go, and only rarely overplays his hand. The tension is layered on in ever-increasing levels, with intermittent explosions of violence that prevent the reader from drawing breath. Combine this with the rapid pace, and the book is the definition of a page-turner.

The characters are, for the most part, intriguing. Sutherland imbues them with enough personality to prevent the main characters from being the ciphers or stereotypes. Fully rounded, the two main characters displays the individual thoughts and motivations needed to make them truly three dimensional characters, and seeing them come into conflict is a satisfying, if unpleasant experience.

However, as mentioned above, there are some rough patches, mostly having to do with the other characters. While the two main characters are fully-rounded, the side characters could have done with some buffing. One, in particular, gets a lovely chapter chock full of motivation and personality and is then shunted to the side for the remainder of the book.

Too, there's a portion of the book that stands out like a sore thumb, where the reader is yanked from the claustrophobic environment Sutherland has worked so hard to build and thrust out into the wider world, where the cataclysm rages. It's a taste of a wider story that should either have been lengthened or left out altogether. While it is interesting-and exceedingly so, especially when one considers the implications of what occurs-it isn't enough to really justify the break in the tension.

This aside, Frozen Blood is a pitch-perfect debut horror novel. It hits all the right points and moves so quickly, so smoothly, that the reader can easily ignore when it hits the wrong ones as well. It's entertaining and well-written and the end comes all too quickly.

In the end, the reader is left with more questions than answers, and a sensation that they've been silent witness to something horrible. In other words, exactly what a good horror novel should be.

Tara, a recovering alcoholic, drives to Canada to help get things in order after her father's death. When she gets to her father's home, in a very well-to-do neighborhood, she must deal with the hatred and animosity of her twin sister and the guilt surrounding the death of her niece. If the funeral arrangements and her sister's hatred were the only things Tara had to face things would be just peachy, but she is also haunted by the image of her dead father, who instructs her and pushes her to do things that she really doesn't care to do. On top of the other catastrophes that are happening in Tara's life at this time, an ice storm traps everyone in the house. It's an ice storm to end all ice storms, and as the end approaches, Tara must face her demons or die trying.

Frozen Blood is a well-written story that keeps building and building up until the climactic end. There are no heroes in this book, and really no villains; just a few people trying to get through an unbearable moment in their lives. The horror of this tale also presents itself on many different levels. There is tension between all of the characters throughout the entire story, horrifying ghosts, ghastly deaths, and apocalypses unlike any others I've ever read about. At the halfway point, the story really begins to build momentum and becomes hard to put down. This story is certainly a keeper and I would recommend it to any library, both public and private.

Reviewed by Bret Jordan at MonsterLibrarian(dot)com

Joel A. Sutherland has put together a great first novel. While many writers fill their prose with large amount of descriptive text about everything and anything, Joel tends to shy away from that approach instead focusing on the dialogue, actions and thoughts of the characters involved. This results in the creation of a piece of literature that is not only a much quicker and easy read but one that really allows you to get into the heads and mindset of the main characters. The reader is almost overcome with a sense of cabin fever themselves while reading this book.

Frozen Blood has touches of Stephen King's The Shining but is very much a different read. While The Shining truly centers around a family in a haunted location, Frozen Blood never reveals if the house is haunted, whether Tara Stewart (the main character) is a ghost magnet or whether she's just plain crazy. Though this sounds cliche on the surface, Mr. Sutherland manages to keep it fresh and interesting throughout.

Joel Sutherland doesn't create the perfect novel with his first outing but it was good enough to be nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. And while not perfect, Frozen Blood does have me looking forward to the next genre novel to come from this author. Highly recommended for anyone looking for a quick, easy reading genre novel... especially one that takes place in Canada.

This is a book that I wish I had written. I bought this book, started to read it on a Sunday afternoon, and before I knew it, the day was shot, the book was done, and I had a ton to think about.

If you're looking for a happy Lifetime Network Estranged-sisters-find-their-way-back-together-in-the-face-of-adversity story, find another book, because this ain't it. On the other hand, if you're looking for a dark, gritty story of a woman fighting her demons the best way she knows, this is it. But that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Throw in the storm to beat them all, and a house with a definite attitude problem, and you get a small idea of just how good this book is. Well-developed characters with believable motivations that force you to care about what happens to them. This book is proof that you don't need grotesque descriptions or graphic violence to make a true horror novel. You also don't need flowery prose or Machiavellian plots to make an engrossing story.

This book's a keeper, and I'll be looking forward to reading more of Joel's work as his career progresses.

For an author's first novel, this book has some very fine qualities. Its characters are interesting and just quirky enough. They have experiences that I never would have expected, and that's always a plus. In fact, the entire storyline is so unpredictable that I couldn't put the book down. I had to know what would happen next. Its horror is subtle, though there are moments of squick. It's not a gore-fest. It's psychological, inter-personal and surprisingly epic.

Joel Sutherland's Frozen Blood is a good first novel and has been nominated for the Horror Writers Association's prestigious Stoker award in that category. Sutherland's style is smooth and flows well, and he makes good use of sensory details that immerse the reader in the novel's setting, in this case a rural family manor outside Ottawa in the midst of a freakish hailstorm of Biblical proportions that seems to be threatening the entire world.

That said, however, I can't give this particular book more than 3 stars. Sutherland writes well, but the story he tells is just too familiar on certain levels, with a seen-this-done-before feeling that I kept running into. Too many of the plot elements -- three people trapped in a big mansion that at times seems to have a life of its own, with malicious ghosts, cut off from the rest of the world by severe weather, breaking down under the strains of isolation, dysfunctions and resurgent alcoholism -- felt reminiscent of plots of many other horror novels, most particularly of Stephen King's The Shining in which all of these elements were present.

Don't get me wrong. Sutherland gives this his best effort and stylistically the novel never wavers; it is a good read for what it is. But at the same time it never rises above the familiar, never manages to hit me with something that will make me remember it as truly standing out from the rest of the horror novel crowd.

I can still recommend the book on this basis -- Sutherland is a good writer and I think with time we will see more and better novels coming from him. So start with this one and then see what he does next, as I intend to. It will be interesting to see what he can do with something more ambitious.