{"id":222,"date":"2013-03-18T10:29:21","date_gmt":"2013-03-18T14:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/?p=222"},"modified":"2013-03-18T10:30:39","modified_gmt":"2013-03-18T14:30:39","slug":"book-review-in-a-season-of-dead-weather-by-mark-fuller-dillon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/?p=222","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: In a Season of Dead Weather by Mark Fuller Dillon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at the New Podler Review of Books<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Grab a comfy chair by the fire, a hot drink, and a book of good horror stories. \u00c2\u00a0Those rattling shutters outside? \u00c2\u00a0Just the blowing snow. \u00c2\u00a0Those shadows dancing in the corner? \u00c2\u00a0Fire light, nothing more. \u00c2\u00a0And the whispers behind your chair are your imagination.<\/p>\n

Maybe.<\/p>\n

That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the feeling Mark Fuller Dillon conveys throughout his short story collection\u00c2\u00a0In a Season of Dead Weather<\/i>. In most of the stories, it was never quite clear whether the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153horror\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was in the narrator\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mind or if it was real. The reader was left to interpret at the end.<\/p>\n

And that worked for me. Each Lovecraftian tale was expertly crafted, with poetic and visceral language describing characters enduring the loneliness and isolation of a long winter in the country or the city. Dillon is a Quebec native, so he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no stranger to maddeningly endless winters (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a west Michigan native, so I can sympathize).<\/p>\n

Most of the stories were quite literary and a little confusing to me, a genre reader. But their narrative styles, descriptions, and situations were so unique that I found myself eager to read on just to hear the language rather than find out what happens to the characters.<\/p>\n

In the first story, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Lamia Dance,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a medical student takes a break from his studies \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and braves the snow \u00e2\u20ac\u201c to attend a film festival where see a film that brings back haunting memories from his childhood. The film\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s images of violence and anatomy seemed quite erotic to the narrator. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Lamia Dance\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was either a story about being pushed into a profession that the narrator did not choose for himself…or about a budding serial killer.<\/p>\n

In \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Never Noticed, Never There,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Tom Lighden sees ghastly apparitions in terrible pain on the streets of Ottawa. He is the only one who sees them, as every one else simply walks past them without a second glance. Dillon implies that society has become good at ignoring the pain of others, as we are too busy with our own lives to notice.<\/p>\n

If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever been stuck alone in the woods during winter, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll understand the characters\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 bleak situations in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Shadows in the Sunrise,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Vast Importance of the Night,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Who Would Remain?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Blizzards keep the narrators from civilization, they lose time, and see clawing shadows. Is it madness, ghosts, alien abductions? The reader is left to wonder if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all real or if winter has claimed the characters’ sanity. While the three stories had similar themes, their unique characters and situations sufficiently differentiated them.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Weight of Its Awareness\u00e2\u20ac\u009d had a middle-aged man revisiting a seemingly deserted, walled-off home that he originally tried to explore when he was eighteen. Grotesque sculptures now decorate the gardens, and a dark presence spies him from the home\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blackened windows and infects his mind. The story seemed like an extreme version of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153curiosity killed the cat.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It was the weakest of the seven stories for me; although \u00e2\u20ac\u0153weak\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is a relative term since even this story kept me enthralled.<\/p>\n

The strongest story for me was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When the Echo Hates the Voice.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Paul Bertrand is a brilliant, handsome young man who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always the life of any social gathering and constantly seeks any excuse to be around people. The reason is that he cannot stand to be alone, for that is when the voices and faces visit him. Told by a narrator observing Paul, the story suggests a struggle between two personalities: one that seeks companionship and social reward, and one that seeks to keep us isolated from each other.<\/p>\n

As I said at the beginning, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a genre reader and rarely read stories just for their styles and language. Dillon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s\u00c2\u00a0In a Season of Dead Weather<\/i>\u00c2\u00a0is one of those rare works that can make even a genre reader like me want to take a second look at the literary. Highly recommended.<\/p>\n

Available on\u00c2\u00a0Smashwords.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at the New Podler Review of Books. Grab a comfy chair by the fire, a hot drink, and a book of good horror stories. \u00c2\u00a0Those rattling shutters outside? \u00c2\u00a0Just the blowing snow. \u00c2\u00a0Those shadows dancing in the corner? \u00c2\u00a0Fire light, nothing more. \u00c2\u00a0And the whispers behind your chair are your imagination. Maybe. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,30,25,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-books","category-short-stories","category-smashwords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robsteinerauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}