Ice House Pond

From my real-time review HERE

Ice House Pond - by Steve Rasnic Tem

“More life meant more death.”

A novella-sized tour de force. The male protagonist says the pond is much bigger than it is. A strange statement. [But this ebook is much bigger than it is, too. I had no idea how big when I started it - unlike with a real thick book in your hand as you riffle through its pages assessing its scope. Certainly got my money's worth.] Thus, by means of that ostensibly strange statement, sharing the previous story’s boy’s larger-than-life or imagino-kinetic abilities and whose ‘fog’ trope is now here to be frozen. The male protagonist (who suffers his own past of inter-generational tragedies of wife and daughter in a car accident and more) takes over a desolate ice-property (you have to read this novella to appreciate the enormous stunning scope of that expression, that ’ice-property’ concept in real cold-numbing, cold-abrading, shard-tall grandeur as well as this book’s erstwhile seedy ‘Leaks‘ potential infecting that grandeur, the erstwhile ‘Underground‘ and its ‘hawling’ images, its death-sacrifices to prevent suffering, the purging of past sorrows by creating today greater sorrows or diseases that are paradoxically easier to bear, the Concentration Camp gas ovens [that map-maze with yellowish haze the "mad scientist's" inner earth of my aforementioned 'Nemonymous Night' by dint of its sister novella 'Weirdtongue']; the Ice House’s inner scrying cryological crystal-ball shapes both sickishly mutant and ripe with potential stunning palaces of magic realism (not unlike that sometimes evoked by ’Oscar and Lucinda’ in retrospect) – “…the cold had the presence and intensity of stone” – the ‘genius loci’ of the house, ice pond, ice house that he’s bought, complete with nursery, is via cumulatively powerful prose, or rather an ice-genie-loci? The sun like a huge white eye in the sky reminding me that it is my eye scrying the white screen of this novella (it’s white on my screen). ”Magic ice“. “Ice palaces“. This is Greystone Bay again, now complete with a hinterland of the missing people that the ice has taken and turned into self-redemptive ghosts (your self, not necessarily their selves). An ice house with the scope of a literally global shock, too. Ice block, “love breath” (sharing a bed is important on Valentine’s Day of all days, and I agree with what this novella says so touchingly on this score!). “The oldest cold”. The madness-veined ice-walls. Can memories be frozen like food? (My question, not the novella’s). Fishermen fishing for painted fish (still waiting for something to happen?). Can you tell I’m impressed? Yes, I particularly resonate with the cruel kindness of such fiction. It is replete with traditional stylisms of the Horror fiction genre; it’s as if the artificial world built up cumulatively like an ice sculpture, striking image piled upon striking image with feverous authorial gluttony; it never actually goes over the top because of those genre tropes employed so skilfully, even though it may go over the top for some not accustomed to such literature; and it will melt like all great ice sculptures will inevitably melt as my memory fades with the onset of old age and even my sadnesses will be numbed by the coming ice beyond any melting. Accepting that is like appreciating what makes you accept that. Like this novella. There’s even a bookshop in it with real redolent books waiting to be riffled through. Only global catastrophe will destroy them, I guess. (14 Feb 12 – another 4 hours later)