an Simmons writes too well to write a bad book, certainly this one. A Winter Haunting—which is in part a book about the badness of a bad writer who is (in a sense) writing the bad story of his life in the book we are reading—may be altogether too good for its protagonist, Professor Dale Stewart, whom Dan Simmons readers last encountered as a child in Summer of Night (1991); because Dale Stewart, 40 years later, has not done very well in his life as a man.
He is 52 years old. For most of his adult life he has lived with his wife and two daughters in Missoula, Mont. James Lee Burke's Bitterroot [2001], a savage moral anatomy of late 20th-century life, also identifies Missoula as a natural stamping ground or niche for NIMBY boomers like Dale, with their earth-searing SUVs, their costly children, their fabulously costly ski gear. He is a professor of literature at the local university. He also writes fairly bad novels, PC epics about frontier life in the early West as it was lived by Native Americans and Robert Redfords and gals with RIP BODICE on their early 19th-century T-shirts. And he falls in love with one of his grad
students. He leaves his wife and children, though he retains a ranch house in the mountains.
And then it all falls apart. The fabulously desirable grad student, Clare Two Hearts—polylingual fabulously wealthy savagely smart deeply intellectual daughter of a Native American diva who lives in Europe—leaves him. No mystery there: the mystery is why she shacked up
with him in the first place. His career sags. His last bodice-ripper is crap. He is utterly alone. He tries to commit suicide, but the gun doesn't go off. He stalks Clare, an action which drives him round the bend. He decides to go to ground, to return to his childhood, to the small Illinois town of Elm Haven. All this we have learned through memory and flashback. The novel begins.
Dopplegangers and demons
There is a first-person narrator. It is the voice of the revenant "cyst" of consciousness of Duane McBride, who was killed 41 years earlier, at the time of Summer of Night, and who haunts, or inhabits, or is bound into the farmhouse he lived in as a boy, a place he nicknamed The Jolly Corner. We are warned. When Dale returns home to Elm Haven and when he decides to rent The Jolly Corner and to spend his sabbatical writing a novel which sounds like Summer of Night without the saving undertow of dread, and when Duane makes it clear that he is telling us the live man's tale, then we are surely warned.
Henry James' "The Jolly Corner" (1908) tells the story of man whose outward success as a sophisticated rentier is hollow, for he is a secondary man, a man who feeds on others for his life force; this rentier returns from London to his family home in New York, which he finds haunted by the ghost of his alternate self, the ghost of the person he would have become had he remained in New York. He meets the ghost at last. There is a Jamesian hover of mutual incorporation. At the end he falls safe into the arms of the woman who loves him—though (as Simmons notes in his precis of the tale) it has taken the ghost's carnal appeal to awaken the two live folk into salvation.
So we are warned. The supernatural incursions depicted in A Winter Haunting—the female revenant who arouses Dale and the male revenant, the bully from the previous book, who tries to ingest him, the minatory hounds from Below, who are the black dogs of depression and of Anubis—are all manifestations of the coming together of the dead Twin and the live one, the past and the present. They are a profound, nauseating hover in the passages that make reality, as though alternate universes, alternate lives, lay in the balance. And indeed, for A Winter Haunting to make sense at all, this must be the case.
Unless Dale marries Duane, which is to say marries his deep memories of the shattering events of 1961 in Elm Haven, which is to say marries himself at last, he will be forever lost. There will be nothing left of him but the badness of his boomer life: the fake choices, the fake career, the fake stories he has written and the fake past ("those distant, intense days of dying innocence") he tries to create in his sabbatical novel about Elm Haven, the fake marriage (we never meet his wife, it is as
though she cannot be touched through the shroud of charade), the anguish of his "love" for someone who sees right past him into reality.
An ending that holds true horror
The last pages of the book are both bad—lots of identikit horror stuff with animate harvesting machines and neo-Nazis and seductive lamias, the sort of genre-bound stuff we'd expect Dale to come up with if he were to dramatize his own inner odyssey—and superb, as we begin to believe that Dale may be marrying into the life he left behind, that he may become real at last.
There is, however, no real security, as the tale closes, that Dale will successfully reknit himself. The 21st-century America Dale now inhabits is not simply an exudation of the mid-life crisis of the
boomer generation. It is a Waste Land. It is Dale's "deep and silent conviction that everything of value to him had been left behind in the old century"; and there is nothing in Simmons' text—certainly not the development-savaged Missoula Dale/Duane are heading toward on the last
page—to counter that conviction, that the 20th century is the Bad Twin of the 21st.
That something very bad is about to happen.
It is a conviction, or intuition, or hover of implication, that A Winter Haunting shares with Stephen King's and Peter Straub's Black House and with Greg Bear's Vitals. In all these books, we are swept by story—story told so well you can almost believe that nothing matters but the story well told—into that final moment of the telling of story, that instant of hover between shutting the book and opening the eyes.
That instant when the story says endit.
The hover! The hover!
