I liked that 'Chills' opened with a cult having already carried out a ritual sacrifice to open a door between worlds and invite in the creatures who will clear the way for the arrival of the Elder Gods by killing everyone in the small town of Colby. This was a more interesting take than all those stories about someone trying to stop the cult before the door is opened and risking being seen as insane. The mutilated dead bodies splatter across the unseasonal snow provide convincing evidence that something strange is happening.

I also liked the creatures that had been sent to 'cleanse the town of light'. They were original, well-imagined and very scary. I was impressed that there was more than one kind and by their relationship to the snow that is burying the town in the middle of May.

The midsection of the book had a lot of traditional horror scenes where one or more civilians find themselves in the path of the killer monsters while we were kept in suspense about if and how they might survive. There was a huge body count and a lot of slicing, dicing, bleeding, screaming and dying. Mary SanGiovanni did a good job in making the snow and the things that emerged from it menacing.

The main character, Kathy Ryan, the person the police call when a case involves cults or other weird things, has a well-thought-through traumatic background that I hadn't seen used before.

So why did I finish this book disappointed and with no interest in reading the next Kathy Ryan book?

Firstly, Kathy Ryan doesn't really come across as the main character. We see very little of the story from her point of view and even when we do, we don't really get inside her head except as a convenient device for disclosing her traumatic backstory. It's really hard to engage with a character when you are given almost no insight into how they feel about what is happening to them and to the people around them.

Secondly, it often felt as if Detective Glazier was the main character, which was a pity because he was so bland that I'm already starting to forget him. Did this story need to spend so much time on a divorced middle-aged detective who represses his emotions, is dogged and determined but not particularly talented and who never really figures out what's going on? I kept waiting for us to move on to another character when we were following him around. And the way he reacted to his ex-wife being in danger did not endear him to me. On the other hand, he was so bland that there wasn't enough there for me to build up a solid dislike of the man.

Then there was the dialogue. The purely functional, disclose-information or move-the-plot-along stuff went well enough but the interpersonal stuff needed work because the characters seemed to me to take turns giving speeches about how they felt rather than talking to each other. It didn't help that the narrator's delivery was flat and, apart from giving Tegan an unconvincing Irish accent, didn't give the characters identifiable voices.

It was the ending that finally snuffed out my interest. I was sitting there thinking 'We had all that build-up and all that death and all those truly scary monsters and THIS is how the situation resolves?'

Maybe I could have lived with the ending if the book had stopped when the action did but the last chapter or so was a return to normality that was stretched my suspension of disbelief much more than the idea of Elder Gods coming through a portal to a small town in the US did.

I read 'Chills' for the Ice Cold Fear square on my Halloween Bingo card. ( )

A storm is coming, and there is an unimaginable evil in it. This is no ordinary storm, and starting with the discovery of a ritualistic murder victim we are given just a taste of what's ahead. Jack Glazier had worked homicide for 9 years, but he had never seen anything like this. Kathy Ryan is brought in on the investigation, Kathy is an expert on ritual and occult type murders and bears the scar of her first brush with the Hand of the Black Stars cult.....and then the snow starts.. and people are unprepared for what it brings.
This book started off so strong, and I loved Kathy Ryan and her back story. Other than Kathy I just didn't have a lot of interest in the other main characters, though I did like quite a few of the expendable characters brought in for the sake of doing away with them in truly chilling ways. After a very strong start it seemed to just lag a bit in the middle, though the action did pick up again towards the end. All in all well worth a read.
I received an advance copy for review
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It was the hope of reading something really chilling was what drove me to read this book. And, at first, I thought that it would turn out to be pleasant reading. I liked the feeling of a doomed city that is taken over by snow monsters and a little group of people trying to save the town, and the world. However, somewhere along the way the story just lost the appeal for me. I think one of the main reason was that the characters were not very memorable. In the end, I think Morris was the only one that was interesting reading about, the rest just lacked anything substantial. I had high hope for Kathy making the book interesting with her dark background, but in the end, she turned out to be spending most of the time trying to find a spell to reverse the opening of the door to the other world. And, thus the one character in the book that really appealed to me when I started to read the book faded into the background. Yes, I did find Kathy and Teagan in the beginning an interesting "couple", But, then I lost interesting in them both when they started to get cozy in the middle of danger.

Also, I think the story should have been built up a bit better, with a slower start, then there would have been more anticipations for larger and frightening things to happened. Now it was just killing from the beginning to the end, and because of that, there was no thrill in reading the book because you hardly got to know any characters, more than the cops. The rest was just people waiting to be killed. No point in getting attached because most people they were killed as soon as they were introduced. Sure, one or two survived, but they were in the story for a page or two never to be heard of again.

And, another problem was that it was not frightening to read, not even a bit chilling. Hell, I was mostly bored towards the end of the book and just wanted the book to end so that I could read something else.

So, the book started promising, then the story started to get more and more uninteresting and the ending was quite dull. Not, a book for me.

I want to thank Kensington Books for providing me with a free copy for an honest review! ( )

Recensione sul blog: http://thereadingpal.blogspot.it/2017/11/recensione-149-chills.html

Colby, Connecticut. Quando tutti si stanno ormai preparando per l'estate, una terribile nevicata interrompe i loro piani. Allo stesso tempo, cominciano ad essere ritrovati diversi cadaveri recanti simboli strani e a cui vengono tolte parti del corpo. Con l'aumentare del numero di cadaveri-sacrificio, aumenta anche la neve. E tutto ciò può essere ricollegato solo ad una specifica setta.
I protagonisti di questo libro sono Kathy Ryan, Jack Glazier e Teagan. Sono loro che devono contrastare la setta della Mano delle Stelle Nere e che devono capire come fermare sia gli omicidi che la brutale nevicata.
Kathy è quella che sicuramente viene esplorata di più. E grazie al cielo, non è solo la banalissima tipa cazzuta senza sentimenti che riesce a fare tutto, e fa lo stesso se non ha amici o persone importanti nella sua vita... blah blah. Kathy è davvero una donna forte, completa. Intelligente. Ma anche lei prova paura, terrore, e vorrebbe qualcuno accanto. La sua relazione con Teagan diventa sempre più importante, ma non intacca il corso della storia e non ne prende il possesso. Insomma, è in background. Cosa molto gradita perché odio quando la storia d'amore prende il sopravvento su libri che non sono romance.
Per quanto riguarda Jack, non sono riuscita a legarmi a lui come a Kathy. È sicuramente un ottimo poliziotto e molto legato alla sua famiglia ma mi è parso un po'... blando.
La storia l'ho trovata forse non originalissima, ma ben delineata: una setta occulta che cerca di "purificare" con la neve il nostro mondo per la venuta di antichi dei. Non solo osserviamo gli eroi in azione; Mary SanGiovanni fa in modo di legarci anche da alcune delle vittime, e a farci sentire il loro terrore mentre le creature della neve e la setta portano avanti la Purificazione. L'autrice riesce davvero a catturare la nostra attenzione. Forse avrei preferito vedere di più la setta in azione. E non dico solo dal punto di vista delle vittime, come l'autrice ha fatto, ma proprio dal punto di vista dei carnefici. Insomma, i tratti psicologici in via diretta, più o meno. Un po', certamente, lo vediamo quando Kathy parla con gli ex-membri, e anche alla fine, ma avrei preferito qualcosa di più "diretto", diciamo, e non solo nelle ultime pagine.Anche il sistema di credenze della setta è particolare. Si parla di dèi Grandi e Minori, di creature purificatrici, di Gente Azzurra che è estrememanete potente. E sinceramente penso che neanche loro sappiano davvero le conseguenze delle loro azioni e la potenza delle forze che stanno cercando di evocare. Gli ex-membri della setta che conosciamo attraverso Kathy e i membri attuali che incontriamo alla fine mostrano una dedizione quasi cieca. Hanno praticamente il cervello fuso! Sono ossessionati da quello che secondo loro dovrà accadere, inevitabile e necessario. In alcuni punti hanno idee piuttosto morbose. Più che i mostri della neve, sono gli umani occulti che dovrebbero scatenare paura.
Lo stile è fluido, e anche la traduzione è ottima. Ciò permette una lettura veloce, senza interruzioni, e piuttosto piacevole. Mary SanGiovanni ha creato una storia interessante e ha fatto in modo di farci legare ai personaggi, come anche di provare le loro sensazioni. Nel complesso, lettura piacevole.
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