Malfi's Thrills Are as Pure as Snow

 

Timothy Sáenz

Blog Post – Snow

Due: Friday, 9 April 2021

RIG – Monsters

Prof. Scott Johnson

MFA in Writing Popular Fiction

Snow is a horror story with subtle threads of science fiction woven into it and penned by Ronald Malfi. This classifies it as a piece of speculative fiction set in a small, isolated, fictional Iowa town in the midst of a massive Christmas Eve blizzard. Malfi keeps up a furious pace and piles on complication after complication as a band of four travelers try to get help for their dead Jeep Cherokee by walking to the nearest town, called Woodson. It turns out Woodson needs their help. It has been invaded by snow-like creatures under the cover of snow. The creatures use their sharp, scythe-like arms to tear open a portal in the backs of humans by which they enter and take control of them. The possession of adults is horrible enough, but the effort leaves children faceless and cut off even from the invaders.

Malfi’s imagery and ability to conjure up complication after complication grabbed me like a dock hand grabbing a sack of coffee beans and hurling it on board an old schooner for transport. However, since point of view has become a point of discussion in my thesis project, I will address a few observations I had concerning Malfi’s use of it.

Malfi employed a third person limited perspective. However, I found that he did not rely on one character only through he told his story that way. He used Todd Curry, whom I will call the lead protagonist, a majority of the time. However, Malfi shifted to Kate Jansen’s point of view in some of the scenes in Part Two of the book. This happened in scenes where Todd and Kate were not together. Similarly, when Shawna Dupree was by herself or in a scene with Nan Wilkerson, Malfi told the story from her perspective.

Interestingly, I felt a break in perspective, specifically the fourth wall, may have occurred in Part Two, Chapter 16, p. 174 where Malfi writes:

If it had been his hope to peek in through the glass, he was shit out of luck.

Todd did not say this line. It was not presented as his thought either by, for example, the use of italics or attribution. Of course, it wasn’t action, so nothing was being shown. We seemed to have an editorial comment from the author. The sentence was a counterfactual, so I imagined Malfi turning toward me (though I don’t know what he looks like) and delivering me his commentary on Todd’s situation. It just struck me as odd and out of place, but it didn’t ruin anything.

Malfi demonstrated himself a master of complications, and their constant appearance gave the story its breakneck, relentless pace. He used the cliffhanger technique to raise those complications. Nan screams at the end of Chapter Five. Todd begins to slither through the ventilator shaft toward whatever awaits at the gun shop at the end of Nine. The St. John’s Church door opens up to allow Todd and Kate to spill away from the possessed skin-suits. Chris knocks out Todd at the end of Chapter 13. “There is something behind you” at the end of 16. Following Todd’s good news that he brought a laptop to town in Chapter 19, 20 finishes with the caveat that he left it back in the snow creature-infested town. It’s great work with Malfi providing one thing after another.

Malfi’s imagery was off the charts, and he introduced and re-introduced me to vocabulary never known or forgotten. Some of the examples of Malfi’s keen vision and articulation are “tallow mucus”, “constellations of blood speckles”, “nacreous light”. Never heard of “nacreous” before. It means pearly or pearlescent. Malfi returned to “crenellated” multiple times in different contexts. It means patterned like a boxy, sideways “S”.

Malfi offered various descriptions of the snow creatures, all of them fascinating and horrifying. The one below is from Chapter 14:

...the smoke brought the creature into frightening relief—the human-shaped head with the distended jowls and the hollow pits for eyes; the thin stalk of its neck; the heart-shaped scurf of its upper chest . . .

I did have a few authorial beefs. I would not have killed off Shawna. That was a mistake and an emotional letdown. Shawna was a remarkable character, and her loss didn’t so much grieve me as anger me. In a book where plenty of good people were dying, she didn’t need to go, especially in the way she did.

The body of Nan Wilkerson falling on the Altar of Christ disturbed me as just another stupid mockery of what goes on in church, as did his petty characterizations of Chris and Meg, who came off sounding like Southern Baptists when they were supposed to be Catholic. In the same vein, the sentence Malfi wrote about Shawna experiencing “pain [that] was like a thousand holocausts” was ill-devised, especially since fire or heat had nothing to do with how the wound was caused or what she was feeling. It didn’t work. Malfi would return to the holocaust simile in Chapter 28 in a more effective way.