Ahira's Hangar

In the award winning A Winter Haunting, one of the boys from Summer of Night goes home to Elm Haven, Illinois, as a middle aged man whose life has self-imploded.
Dale Stewart was a well respected college professor in Montana, with a wife and two daughters -- until he had a passonate affair with a much younger woman and lost everything -- his wife, children, lover, sanity...
So he goes home to live in his childhood friend Duane's house, to pull himself back together, and write a book...
But he has private demons waiting for him back in Elm Haven...

Quote:A once-respected college professor and novelist, Dale Stewart has sabotaged his career and his marriage - and now darkness is closing in on him. In the last hours of Halloween he has returned to the dying town of Elm Haven, his boyhood home, where he hopes to find peace in isolation. But moving into a long-deserted farmhouse on the far outskirts of town - the one time residence of a strange and brilliant friend who had lost his young life in a grisly "accident" back in the terrible summer of 1960 - is only the latest in his long succession of recent mistakes. Because Dale is not alone here. He has been followed to this house by the shadows of private demons who are now twisting his reality into horrifying new forms. And a thick blanketing early snow is starting to fall... Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
****Tavern Wench of DOGMA, the Defenders of George Martin's Art****<i></i>

A WINTER HAUNTING is a different kind of sequel than what you might expect from a sequel. It's almost like the flip side of SUMMER OF NIGHT. And the occurrences in one book, when viewed from the perspective of the other book, make you question which is reality.

Greg <i></i>

The two books are very different in tone and content. It is a sequel more in that it contains some of the same settings and characters, though seperated by some forty years in time. There is also an undercurrent of Egyptian mythology running deep down in both books... Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
****Tavern Wench of DOGMA, the Defenders of George Martin's Art****<i></i>

Unfortunately I haven't yet read the Summer of Night but I did enjoy A Winter Haunting It was both real and realistically terrifying. Simmons creates a wonderfully false sense of reality for the basis of the book that keeps the reader off balance throughout the story. I did not,however, care for the ending. It seemed to be particularly weak compared to the body of the story. This seems to be a common ailment in contempoary fiction... <i></i>

I was dissappointed in this one because I loved Summer of Night so much. Plus I loved Bag of Bones by SK and many compared this book to that one. It wasn't a bad book, just as someone said, totally different tone and style.