Review: Snow

If you've never read Ronald Malfi's 2010 novel Snow, don't worry—you don't need to.

Am I being harsh? Maybe. But there's something about Snow that reads like a cautionary tale about how not to approach editing and publishing—because while the ideas behind the story are brilliantly original, the book itself could have used some heavy rewrites before those pages ever saw the business end of a printing press.

Because this week's reading in Writers Workshop of Horror focused on narrative point of view (POV), I'll start out by saying that one of Snow's cardinal sin was its compulsive head-hopping. While the story opened with a close (enough) third-person POV to make me think that Todd Curry was to be our main character, several chapters later Malfi began hopping into other characters' perspectives: first Kate, Todd's ill-fated love interest, then hometown hero Shawna, then a number of other characters from whom we sometimes never heard again. By the end of the book, we encountered chapters where the POV seemed to shift with every few paragraphs.

The effect was not to help me empathize with the entire cast, but rather to distance me from Todd and each other character in turn. While I appreciate the utility of capturing events happening simultaneously in different places, especially in the horror genre, I wish Malfi had picked a POV and stuck to it—whether that was a close third in Todd's head alone, several perspectives that alternated with predictable regularity, or a truly omniscient third that used emotional distance to its advantage rather than its detriment.

I mention the idea of a cautionary tale because I can't help but think this sort of head-hopping is the stuff editors are hired to catch. I mean, that's their jobs, right? Who edited this book? Was Malfi really so stubborn that he eschewed all warnings, or did his editor just sh*t the bed?

I'm sorry to keep picking on this imaginary editor, but a few more things they should have picked up on: an overwhelming number of "to be" verbs (the ideas he was describing were fascinating, but the descriptions themselves? Zzz...), pages with a half-dozen similes or more (literally, I counted), similes describing leg pain as equivalent to "a thousand holocausts" (seriously, what does that mean?? As a Jew, I should be offended by that, right??), and a million other minute details of word choice and sentence structure. And I know—this is a writing class, not a copyediting class. These aren't the kinds of details that necessarily detract from the quality of a story as a whole, cohesive tale. But they're the kinds of details that distract from the story, as intriguing and compelling as the plot itself might be.

A final note on the plot—I was actually enjoying most of the action (barring a descriptive writing style that made me feel as if I were reading a screenplay rather than a novel) right up until the final battle. As I sat at a (slightly too) comfortable emotional distance from Todd and Kate while the battle against the alien threat came to a final climax, they too sat at a comfortable distance from the action, peering through the blinds in their hideout while a recent addition to the cast of characters sacrificed his life to save them in a fiery blaze of glory. He goes up in a ball of flame and suddenly, the story is... over.

I'm sorry, what? Why weren't we following this guy? What were we doing getting this story from the perspective of nice-guy Todd who runs for the hills when threatened without even checking to see if his companions are alive, let alone following behind him? Bruce shows up for all of five minutes, ingeniously working on a plan to contact the outside world and save the town (which works), then blows himself up with the entire horde of snow-monsters (which also works), all while taking sh*t from the other survivors who liked his boss better than him. Why the hell wasn't this Bruce's story?

And this is, again, why I blame the editor. Because I know, as a writer, that first drafts suck. They contain nuggets of gold—brilliant concepts, original monsters, tender moments between characters—but those nuggets need to be mined, refined, worked into something functional. You don't just write a manuscript and publish it; you write and you rewrite, you have someone read it and then you rewrite it again, ad nauseam. You add scenes. You delete characters. You refine plot arcs. You change perspective.

Snow feels like it got through a handful of revisions, then somehow ended up on the printing pile by mistake. I don't blame Malfi, because I think the ideas are all there—truly. He's got some real nuggets of gold. But who on earth read this draft and decided it was time for him to stop revising?


Citations: Malfi, Ronald. Snow. Leisure Books, 2010.