Kate’s Review: “Dead of Winter”

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Book: “Dead of Winter” by Darcy Coates

Publishing Info: Poisoned Pen Press, July 2023

Where Did I Get This Book: I received an ARC from the publisher.

Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound

Book Description: From bestselling author Darcy Coates comes Dead of Winter, a remote cabin in the snowy wilderness thriller that will teach you to trust no one. There are eight strangers. One killer. Nowhere left to run.

When Christa joins a tour group heading deep into the snowy expanse of the Rocky Mountains, she’s hopeful this will be her chance to put the ghosts of her past to rest. But when a bitterly cold snowstorm sweeps the region, the small group is forced to take shelter in an abandoned hunting cabin. Despite the uncomfortably claustrophobic quarters and rapidly dropping temperature, Christa believes they’ll be safe as they wait out the storm.

She couldn’t be more wrong.

Deep in the night, their tour guide goes missing…only to be discovered the following morning, his severed head impaled on a tree outside the cabin. Terrified, and completely isolated by the storm, Christa finds herself trapped with eight total strangers. One of them kills for sport…and they’re far from finished. As the storm grows more dangerous and the number of survivors dwindles one by one, Christa must decide who she can trust before this frozen mountain becomes her tomb.

Review: Thank you to Poisoned Pen Press for sending me an ARC of this novel!

Back in the spring I took my solo trip up to Duluth, Minnesota, a city on Lake Superior that is definitely one of my happy places. It was late April, but let me tell you, it felt like winter. There was snow, it was about thirty degrees, and driving into the city felt like I was driving into a blizzardy tundra for the last ten miles of my drive. But that backdrop was perfect for one of the books that I brought withe me, Darcy Coates’s new horror novel “Dead of Winter”. I’ve really enjoyed pretty much everything I have read by Coates, and her more recent reads have been the “Gravekeeper” series, which is a bit more on the tamer side of horror. Sure, ghosts and those who can see them are creepy, but it was more of a cozy horror tale. So settling into “Dead of Winter” was interesting, given that the pretty early on we get a very graphic description of a decapitated head pinned to a tree. I cackled to myself and thought ‘oh that’s right, Coates can also go hard’. And that was a good omen for things to come, because “Dead of Winter” was a hoot and a half.

It was so fun to jump from the more dark fantasy/horror lite feel of the “Gravekeeper” books to this more hardcore/familiar to me Coates aesthetic of bloodbath and nightmare fuel. The horror elements merge well with the thriller ‘whodunnit’ aspects, with a familiar trapped in isolation with a killer trope combined with some slashery goodness. It’s a fast and fun read, with some pretty wicked gory moments and a no holds barred take on picking off the strangers in the cabin, therein culling the suspect pool in crazier and crazier ways. Coates ratchets up the suspense and gives us a lot of red herrings to the mystery aspect, and creates kills that feel like they are right out of any decent slasher movie. From decapitations to scattered teeth to frozen corpses, the visceral scares are continuous and always on point. Again, it was a real trip reading some of these really gory moments after the tamer “Gravekeeper” books, but it just goes to show that Coates contains horror multitudes and can achieve the vision she is going for across the board.

When looking at the thriller elements, this classic locked room set up is familiar but still engaging. Christa is our protagonist who is isolated in a winter snowstorm in a hunting cabin with strangers, and as they start dying one by one she has to figure out who is killing them and what their motive could be. It’s pretty old hat in how it is revealed and approached, and I had pretty easily figured it all out about halfway through. That isn’t to say that my conviction didn’t waver, however, as there were a few red herrings that did make me question my theories. Ultimately I could guess what was going on, but it didn’t really detract from my enjoyment of the book overall. Part of that is because I did like Christa as our main character and liked seeing her piece together all of the pieces. The other part is that, at the end of the day, approaching this like all my favorite 80s psycho killer movies, the journey through is the more important part than the ultimate solution. It didn’t matter that I knew who did it almost from the jump. It was a wild ride and that is exactly what I want from a book that reads like a slasher movie.

We are fully into the summer season now, and if you are a horror or thriller fan that wants a fun and bloody beach read, look no further than a snow ridden hunting cabin. Darcy Coates, you continue to impress me, and “Dead of Winter” should be on any horror lover’s list.

Rating 8: A fun and straight out of a movie slasher thriller that is the perfect summer read in spite of the cold setting.

Reader’s Advisory:

“Dead of Winter” is included on the Goodreads list “Horror to Look Forward to in 2023”.