I am (maybe overly) careful not to include any spoilers here, hoping to give you a sense of what you are in for reading the book without stealing any of the fun.
One major challenge of writing a great thriller is delivering surprises to a reader who is fully expecting surprises. That's the definition of a thriller - that there are twists and turns. There's no secret here.
A skilled writer like Darcy Coates knows how - like the best magician - to happily distract the reader with suspenseful situations and rich details and entertaining characters so that, when a surprise hits, it is genuinely unexpected. The reader is 'looking the other way'. Coates delivers that great feeling of “woah”, because the reader was set up for a twist and never knew it. Abracadabra.
Bottom line, Dead of Winter — published in 2023 and now in paperback — is non-stop fun, with genuine suspense and, yes, surprises along the way. Right from the start, the story effortlessly transports you to a place and a moment, finding our guide Christa fighting through a brutal snow storm in the Rockies with her boyfriend Kiernan leading the way. I am a huge fan of characters who start off ordinary and experience real physical limitations when trying to survive extraordinary events. Coates plays right into this, giving us a visceral sense of Christa’s fatigue as she trudges through deep snow, her thighs “burning” and muscles “screaming” through the “waist-high drifts”:
Every step was a struggle, a slow-motion fight against a world that wanted to pull her down and bury her.
Coates goes further, describing how the cold air “shaves” Christa’s throat, drying her out, pushing her lungs to the point where they are burning. Her vision becomes claustrophobic in the torrent of snow, “a blurred smear of grey and white”. She must push past the pain and mental disorientation and panic and just keep moving.
By drawing us into the moment by moment physical challenge of navigating wilderness in a violent storm, Christa becomes instantly relatable, a fragile human rather than a superhero or even a mere ‘character in a book’. Christa struggles to breathe, her vision is blurred, her thighs burn from fatigue — I could immediately relate, imagining how an unexpected, forced hike through a Rocky Mountain snow storm would be near-impossible to survive without collapsing in uncontrollable, heaving breaths, as I gasp for oxygen. This relatability heightens every frightening scenario that follows.
And Coates brilliantly keeps the action rolling, the danger rising. There are thrillers that build suspense by having each chapter jump to a new place, launching multiple plots — sometimes in multiple timelines — increasing the tension as each thread comes closer to converging. I am reading and enjoying Scott Carson’s Departure 37 which falls in this category. But Dead of Winter is more the roller coaster style story. You get on and are immersed in a place and you are off and running.
Coates leans heavily on cliffhanger beats, where chapters end mid-scene at a crucial moment, making it almost impossible not to start the next chapter. Notorious page-turners like Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code might over-do this, where a chapter ends when Robert Langdon ‘pulls open the heavy door, horrified by what he saw’ and the reader has to turn the page to find out that ‘inside was a jacket, inappropriate for the dinner’. Why did I just choose a jacket? I don’t know. Point is, Coates deploys this forced page-turn technique and it really works, because the non-stop momentum is true to the scenario. We are with the characters in real-time as they navigate an ever-changing, always perilous scenario. They don’t get a break, and, happily, neither does the reader.
It’s worth noting that Dead of Winter delivers on the gore front in the best way. That means you get the shock value without dwelling in human suffering. There is fun gore and there is stuff that gets too dark and ‘real’ where you wonder why you are being put through a nihilistic, bleak and horrible experience. If you’ve read Hannibal by Thomas Harris, you know gore can become deeply disturbing, overly clinical or viewed through eyes that find evil appealing. Dead of Winter keeps its carnage edgy in the fun zone, a la Stephen King. It’s done in a way that delivers the visceral “woah” factor without making you want to put the book down and see a therapist.
Dead of Winter takes us to a remote cabin in the woods, which is a common location in the world of thrillers. But I actually love when novels unapologetically use classic motifs — the haunted house, the old hospital, the cabin in the woods — and dare to tell an original story. Because an old cabin the woods is a great setting. And Coates showers us with so many specifics and great backstory and unique characters that we never see this as some archetypal cabin but as a specific place our characters must survive. Some even do. But no spoilers here.
The novel is simple in the best way, delivering what it promises on the box. If set pieces recall scenes from horror movies, you welcome it. Because Coates delivers them with a real-time feel, never forgetting the physical hurdles our human characters must overcome to rise to the occasion and — hopefully — survive the night.
Dead of Winter is available for purchase at independent booksellers here. Note - this is an affiliate link, which means a small part of your purchase supports this site.
