Michael C. Norton’s The Blizzard (1988) is the first in what will be a long summer of 1980s Horror novels. The people to blame are Grady Hendrix and his wonderful book, Paperbacks From Hell (2017) and my brother, Tim, who bought it for me. (Thanks, bro!) Hendrix’s book is a tongue-in-cheek look at all the novels that came in the wake of Stephen King, Ira Levin and Peter Blatty. Like the appearance of The Sword of Shannara in the wake of The Lord of the Rings, 1970s and 80s paperbacks latched onto good books and spewed forth many imitations. Some are awful. And some are not so bad. Like Norton’s book.
I have to admit I have been a bit of a Horror snob, sticking to the long-runners like King, Graham Masterton, Ramsey Campbell and Robert R. McCammon. You can add to that the later Leisure book writers like Hugh B. Cave (yes, I am aware of his Pulp career), Doug Clegg, Brian Keene and such, but of the also-rans of the 70s and 80s I was aware but never stooped to read. Much to my loss.
The first surprise for me in Hendrix’s books was the book he chose as the one that got him into cheap Horror novels. The Little People (1972), a book about Nazi leprecahuns. Who could have written such a crappy book? Well, it was one of my favorite SF writers, John Christopher (Samuel Youd), author of the Tripods, No Blade of Grass, etc. That stopped me dead in my tracks. Maybe my snobbishness was just plain ignorance. I had to find out. So I am reading some of the books Hendrix mentions (I don’t know if you would say “recommends”. The whole book is pretty light in tone.)
The first of these is Michael C. Norton’s Christmastime thriller. Norton only wrote two books I am aware of. (That’s one of the main features of most of the authors in Paperbacks in Hell, short runs of two to four novels. Sometimes just one. In amongst these are career writers I simply ignored like Elizabeth Engstrom and Michael Blumlein.) Norton’s other book is the earlier Abomination (1987), which I will read once I can find it.
Stephen King once described how he wrote Horror as making the audience care about the people in the book then letting the monsters loose. That is exactly the format Norton uses. The first half of the book describes unhappy people all gathering for a Christmas Eve party. There is the narrator, Jordan Scott, his wife of nineteen years, Jane, their thirteen year old daughter, Heather, and their eight year son, Markie. Jordan and Jane’s marriage is sexless and Jordan usually gets drunk at parties and hits on women.
Coming to the house are Jane’s sister, Wilma, an even colder, controlling bitch, her scholarly husband, Merlin, and their daughter, Circe; Jordan’s sister, Jenny Chambers, her husband Jim, and their four kids, one a baby. We also get Linda’s best friend, Linda LaRue, and her younger money bags husband, Leslie, and a single, an old family friend Ralph Stepanksi. All these people interact as families do, with some friction, many secrets and crap that will hit the fan when the monsters show up.
But that won’t happen until around page 200 of this 320 pager. There are some important things that need to happen first. The first is when Linda coaxes Jordan into Markie’s room so she can pleasure him orally. Jordan’s daughter witnesses this. To make matters worse, Linda gives him a sword as a gift, further pushing Jane out. Meanwhile Markie and his cousin. Michael, have been messing with Circe’s high school science project. Adding parts to it, they manage to open a gateway between worlds, effectively trapping the house in a world of snow and demons. (Norton doesn’t leave mention of the monsters out altogether. He teases with occasional snippets about the ape-like cannibals that live to kill and eat.)
Another important event is Linda takes claim of Jordan. Jane finds this too much, taking the sword and attempting to kill the new couple. Things heat up even more when Ralph is accused of raping Heather. Both of them disappear and Jordan spends a lot of time looking for them. When he climbs a ladder in the laundry chute, he ascends higher and higher, much higher than possible for a two-storey house. When he tries to go back down, the same thing happens. There is no end up or down. He finally climbs back into the house. He goes to the upstairs bedroom where everybody is together in blankets. The heat stopped when the house was torn from our reality. Things are getting colder and colder.
Jordan finds Heather and Ralph at last. Three monsters crash through the front door window as the two missing people (stark naked) face off against them. Jordan tries to fight them off but fails. The leader of the monsters rapes Heather as his companions drag off Ralph for dinner. Jordan doesn’t tell anyone one but eventually draws everyone downstairs after Heather returns alone. She tells her father how she killed the leader of the monsters by driving her thumbs into his eyes. With Linda’s help, they start a fire in the fireplace, then kill another monster that attacks them. Heather, now hard as nails, cuts the body up for food.
With a lot of work the party relocates to the library, which has another fireplace. Circe and her father are working on her science project upstairs, trying to get them back to their own world. Jordan learns what kind of woman his new lover is when Linda, armed with his sword dispatches two monsters. He stands by dumbfounded when Wilma, encountering the things for the first time, gives them Jenny’s nursing infant, Robert. This gets her exiled from the house, a sure death sentence.
The group’s numbers increase when Jordan goes to find Les, Linda’s transvestite husband. He finds Les dressed up in women’s clothes. Linda acts jealously demanding to know who this woman is. Jordan tells her over and over it is Les. But it isn’t. It is a woman. But it is. Les, a man who has always wanted to be a woman, has changed into a woman!
Jordan notices that Linda and Heather are both becoming more and more aggressive. Slowly they begin to mutate into large, super-fighters. Jordan heads upstairs to see how Circe is doing on the device. She saves the upstairs people when she converts part of the machine to a heater. While Jordan is upstairs, Linda’s paranoia gets him banished from the fireplace group. He realizes that in this strange reality they are stuck in that wishing for a thing can change you. Les wanted to be a woman, Linda and Heather wanted to be big and powerful… Jordan wishes for invisibility. Circe and Merlin stop seeing him. He slaps Merlin, who is upset then goes back to what he was doing.
Using this new invisibility, Jordan sneaks into library, rescuing Jenny and her remaining children from the reign of Queen Linda, now grown to huge proportions. She has claimed the sword and rules with an iron fist. Jordan, still invisible, leaves Jenny and goes outside. Thinking the monsters can’t see him, he walks endlessly in the snow, which he realizes is actually a combination of ash and snow. He sees a towering flame in the distance and walks towards it.
The distance and cold pull him down. He lies in the ashes waiting to die. Someone pulls him out. It is Wilma. She and Jordan approach the fire, which is a large burning building. They find Ralph and the missing baby Robert. Ralph has torched the home building of the monsters. He has also lost an arm. He explains he never touched Heather. She went for him after seeing Jordan and Linda in Markie’s room. The survivors head for the house with a screaming mob of monsters in pursuit.
Arriving at the house, they find Linda and her crew attacking the upstairs people. Jordan creates a makeshift torch that he uses to set the new Les on fire. His daughter and Linda both are killed as Circe finally manages to get the machine to work. Jane and Jordan make up, wanting to be a family again. Before they can return to our reality, a monster armed with Linda’s sword kills everyone except Jordan. Returned to our space and time, the cops arrest him, blaming him for all the killing.
The narration, like that of an insane H. P. Lovecraft character, is Jordan sitting in prison. He is often beaten by cops and prisoners, wishing to die. He doesn’t want to live because he knows that the monsters were humans of the future. The human race will destroy the planet and be reduced to cannibalism and terror. Thus the books end on a downbeat, the narrator describing his insane adventure for your Christmas reading pleasure…
If I have any caveats about Michael C. Norton’s The Blizzard: be prepared for plenty of 1980s references. Don Johnson, Miami Vice, etc. I could laugh at these, remembering the time well. What I did not laugh at was the way Leslie LaRue was portrayed as a transvestite. I can understand the characters in the story treating him/her badly but it sometimes feels like the author has the same out-of-date attitude. Since the book is narrated by one of the characters, this might make sense, but it is an example of datedness that is not cute.
At one point the narrator describes his predicament thusly:
I felt as if Lewis Carroll, H. P. Lovecraft and Xaviera Hollander had all joined together to write a novel, and I was the helpless main character, answering the demands of their contradictory plotlines.
This is a pretty good summation of this book. It has elements of all three, with mind-boggling Fantasy, cosmic Horror and a good smattering of smut. In this way, perhaps, Norton is identifying his inspirations. The closest thing to an adaptation of this book was the 2015 film, Krampus. A family is trapped in a nether reality when Krampus comes to punish instead of reward the naughty and nice. Structurally the film is quite similar, only the trappings are different with a less downbeat ending.
