What is it about wintertime that lends itself so supplely to the horror genre? Beginning with Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” in 1908, the dangerous beauty of winter was driven home.  Now throw in a dash of the supernatural, as in John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”, which inspired John Carpenter’s low-budget classic “The Thing” (1982) and you have a real recipe for edge-of-your-seat chills. Matthew Hellman builds on the winter-horror tradition with his latest novel “The Biting Cold”.  In 1842, the Ontonagon Boulder, an immense tonnage of float copper was removed from the eponymous county. That very same year, the Chippewa ceded all claims to 30,000 square miles of the Upper Peninsula to the United States Government. Hellman uses the purported disappearance of people in Copper Harbor in 1842 as the central mystery of “The Biting Cold”.  What did those Native Americans know that made them happy to be rid of Copper Harbor?

Outside of Copper Harbor, a few other locales are mentioned such as Calumet and Eagle Harbor. A key discovery takes place on top of Brockway Mountain which will serve as a secondary anchor in the action of the coming battle. The mountain it seems is concealing a series of important aspects of the evil to come including petroglyphs and huge sinkhole that threatens to swallow our two teenage protagonists.

Throughout the area during the ensuing winter, Hellman portrays snowmobile and snowshoe pursuit scenes with great detail and accuracy.  He has a penchant for introducing winter survival techniques and traps in just the right proportion and at just the right juncture in the storytelling. Even though I grew up watching snowmobile races outside Mackinaw City, I learned a thing or two about the dangers of handling a big machine in untracked snows, such as how it can dig itself into a hole in an unpacked snowbank.

-- Read the full review by Victor R. Volkman on U.P. Book Review.

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