Ugh, y’all, I was going to read Laura Kasischke’s A Mind of Winter for RIP IX, but it made me too angry. I did read it, and I can’t deny that, but I hereby did not read it for RIP IX. I just read it. RIP IX may or may not have been happening at the same time.
Two caveats before I begin my complaining:
- My opinion about The Mind of Winter arises from a personal preference that I have about the outcome of ghost stories. I have complained about this on the blog before, so it may come as no surprise to you.
- From here on out, I will be spoiling The Mind of Winter in ragey all-caps. And I will spoil The Machinist, that 2004 Christian Bale psychological thriller, as well, because I don’t like to miss any opportunities to complain about The Machinist, maybe my least favorite movie of all time.
The premise of A Mind of Winter is that Holly wakes up on Christmas Day feeling certain that something followed her family back from Russia, when they came home with their adopted daughter, Tatiana. All through the day, as she’s preparing her family’s Christmas meal, dealing with a medical emergency in her husband’s family, and quarreling with Tatiana, she cannot shake the thought that something malevolent came back with them from Russia, and that she has subconsciously known about it all along.
This year I am feeling more than normally affectionate toward creepy Russia stories, due to the excellent The Necromancer’s House, so I approached A Mind of Winter with great enthusiasm. A malevolent Russian magic something? At the holidays? That followed them home from Russia and is in their house? Nothing is bad about that premise!
Except then I read the end. And guess what.
(Here is the part where I spoil the book for you. Thus saving you the trouble of reading it and being disappointed.)
Holly is hallucinating everything that happens the whole day through, because actually Tatiana has died of a heart defect. There’s more to it than this, which would take too long to explain but it does make that ending more interesting and less cliche than how I’ve made it sound, but mainly, the protagonist is imagining every interaction she has with Tatiana, plus the feeling of malevolence around the house. It is all self-protecting hallucinations to shield her from the knowledge that her daughter died that morning.
I. HATE. IT. when the resolution to the spooky story is that someone was hallucinating it. Why did we bother then? If I am going to read a book about mental imbalance, I will just read a book about mental imbalance. Such books exist! I can seek them out! This very day, I started reading Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom, in which there is mental imbalance and it tells you about it right on the cover. The point of a spooky book is to be spooky. It is not to scare you with atmosphere all along to where you think there is going to be a ghost or something for them to fight against, but then at the end it is like, “No, actually, everything’s very mundane, and regular life is regular. Sorry.”
That is the “And then she woke up” of psychological thrillers. See also: The Machinist, a movie that scared me so badly and then turned out to be so stupid that it engendered in me a lifelong loathing of Christian Bale that has only deepened with the passage of time. I was so furious when I realized that was really, truly, honestly the direction A Mind of Winter was going in that I chucked it across the room (but carefully, to land on a soft chair, because it was a library book).
HMPH.
I reiterate: This book bashed straight into a pet peeve of mine. If you do not have this same pet peeve, maybe you will love A Mind of Winter instead of wanting to hurl it across the room, alarming your puppy and mother.