The House of Frozen Screams

I was surprised to discover that it is Thana Niveau’s first published novel. The reason for being surprised is that Thana is so well known and respected in the horror community that I assumed she was already a best-selling novelist. It’s an easy assumption to have made, for me at least, as I regularly see published anthologies/magazines within which she has stories, such as in the more discerning publications: Black Static, Shock Totem and Interzone to name very few, and have seen advertising for her short story collections ‘Octoberland’ and ‘Unquiet Waters’ as well as her omnipresence in the independent horror scene. Being already familiar with many of her short works I couldn’t wait to see what she would do with the traditional ‘Haunted House’ story. However, ‘The House of Frozen Screams’ isn’t one, although it does take a lot of cues from traditional tales it manages to achieve something quite different in horror writing as it presents a story with three distinct motifs throughout which work together. Anyone familiar with haunted house books and films will have come across the ‘cruel master of the house’, the ‘cries of a phantom baby’, the ‘possession/obsession tearing a relationship apart’ and even the malevolence of the building itself. As the Fun-Boy-Three and Bananarama once informed us “It ain’t what you do… It’s the way that you do it”, and Thana Niveau certainly does it differently.
A simplification would be along the lines of first there was a gate, then there was a house, then there was a fire. The gate is ancient, where it leads to is a mystery which is solved at the end, I’ll say no more about that as it’s a spoiler, but it’s all very cleverly thought out and puts everything into perspective. The house, well that’s something which in essence we have known the likes of before in ‘The Haunting of Hill House’, ‘Rose Red’ and loads of others which feature a mansion-like property in a poor state of repair which is haunted by the type of ‘Master of all he surveys’ guy who stares at you from paintings like in Ghostbusters 2. He’s sadistic to the Nth degree and doesn’t have much else going for him except that. This time he’s not a painting though, he’s a sculptural head extruded from the masonry inside of the building, or at least that’s how I read it. Carson is not all he seems though, and everything gets properly explained, giving him much more depth than is usual for the type of character.

The aforementioned gate is introduced early but nothing much is made of it, as for the fire, well that’s introduced early on for clarity as it is instrumental in several ways. It is the reason that the property is affordable, as half of what would have been a sprawling mansion was reduced to rubble in a fire and was never rebuilt. It’s also a case that there’re allusions of a phantom continuation of the property beyond bricked up doors which lead nowhere. This is actually something I found a little disappointing about the book as the phantom side of the house could have been a far more prominent ‘character’ than it was.

Characterisation is fully fleshed out; with the main character Liz taking up the majority of the book, which is understandable given the storyline, yet I did feel as if her role could have been pared back somewhat to build up other characters whose parts, although important, were underplayed. For me there was a standout character, albeit for the wrong reasons, in Carson, the creator/master of the house. He’s a tad one-dimensional, coming across more as a pantomime villain with no redeeming features at all. There’s a good reason for it, but it would still have been better to my way of thinking if he’d have had something good about him as with Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Dracula, he was an evil sonofabitch but behind it all was grief as a pure motive for his actions.

Regarding the pace, Thana Niveau’s talent for the short form shines through as this is an amalgamation of three story threads, each distinct in its own right. The book started off a little slow, with a few subtle hints at what was to come, which after a couple of chapters left me wondering if it was going to be tedious should it sustain the initial pedestrian pace. However I needn’t have been concerned as it soon picked up and when it did it was like a sledgehammer to the face. The previous sedate ‘love story’ for want of a better description suddenly lurched into such brutality that I actually winced, and I can’t recall the last time a book made me do that. When it got going it didn’t maintain the pace, instead it had something of a feel of the three separate storylines being independently written and then merged together, which may seem like a bad thing, but in this case, assuming it to be deliberate, I think it’s actually a clever move. It still maintains a ‘rollercoaster’ method, but does so in a much more jarring way which fits the material better, making it for the most part unpredictable.

If you are anything like me you actually see a movie in your head when you are reading, and the visuals of The House of Frozen Screams are ‘Cinemascope’ stunning. The descriptions are crystal clear without being overstated and the imagery is cinematic in the ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ mould with a very similar Gothic atmosphere generated in the Carson scenes, and the modern scenes being more reminiscent of the contemporary setting Hammer Horrors. There’s enough here to make anyone squirm with the unrelenting graphic descriptions in the ‘Wrath James White’ camp and a variety of semi-surreal visuals liberally spilling gore on the pages while maintaining a practical reality by not going too far over the top.

It reminded me very much of ‘An American Werewolf in London’, which may sound strange as there are no werewolves involved in The House of Frozen Screams, but bear with me on this: For me ‘American Werewolf’ is about as good as it gets, it has excellent characterisation with no redundancies or fillers, the various locations were carefully plotted to be ideally suited to the actions and the pacing gave adequate breathing space between the horrors to come down from the rush enough before being battered by something even more gruesome. There were dream sequences which pushed the boundaries of sanity without pulling out of the general narrative and the overall film was incredible without being overworked or overly sentimental in spite of the tragic ending. I think of The House of Frozen Screams in the same way, the only real difference being that this book has zero humour, which I think is for the best as it already ticks all of the necessary boxes without the need to self-parody.
For a ‘first’ novel it’s a damned fine baptism and one which will leave many readers wanting more.