Snowball in Hell: DJay's review

For reference, Snowball in Hell was written by alliterator and can be found here.

Pros: Claire was a really brilliant character and I loved her yes. I love how, in the end, she was right all along. The French nursery rhymes were a nice touch, and the cold is always a great topic for horror. The reveal of the true Cold Boy was.. well, I really liked that a lot. John was a very likable narrator, I felt like I could really empathize with him. I sensed a lot of wordplay throughout this, and god, do I love wordplay. All these individual characters were all done so well. I loved how you could tell each person had a detailed life to them, even though you didn't really spend much time focusing on each one. The meeting with Houdin, towards the end, was particularly memorable. A great job, I loved his explanation of simply "Make yourself not a target."

Cons: I couldn't really tell what alliterator was trying to do with the Cold Boy reveal at the end. Like, was he saying the whole thing was just a metaphor for the cold isolation in our hearts? If so, what was the point of Holly and Henry who threw molotovs into a building? Was it supposed to be entirely literal? If it was, then the actual reveal was a little disappointing. I mean, yeah, I get that it's supposed to be eldritch, we can't possibly understand it, but from a reader's point-of-view, it's not very satisfying to have all this build-up only to say "Oh, it's too much information." I know Stephen King was quoted as saying that the reader's gonna be disappointed with your monster because of their own imagination, but still, if you're gonna leave it all up to their imagination, give them some clues as to what to imagine. "A boy with no body," for instance, conjures up more of a mental image than "something I can't describe," even though both can describe the same thing. Drop words to spark trains of thought in the reader's head!

Conclusion: Definitely one of the better Fearblogs out there, had some very memorable moments to it even if it had the occasional low point. alliterator's blogs have always been favourites of mine, though this one doesn't quite reach as high as some of his others might. It was a great basic horror story, but I felt like it was lacking some sort of extra je ne sais quoi.