BLIZZARD by George Stone

Here's a disaster novel with an outstandingly simple idea: what if it didn't stop snowing? The entire eastern seaboard is about to find out, as the flakes just keep coming down, day after day, week after week, until the Boston/NYC/DC megalopolis is buried under TONS of fluffy, freezing DEATH! The Soviets have parked some satellites over the scene and a fleet of perfectly innocent fishing trawlers off shore, but are they just curious snoopers, or sinister appraisers of some sci-fi weather control scheme? It's making the boys in the State Department nervous, and someone's liable to do something reckless if we don't get to the bottom of this BLIZZARD and fast!

It's a breezy, cynical, slightly sleazy '70s thrill ride we're in for, with plenty of post-Watergate apathy and an entropic inevitability around the big blitz - of course this is happening, what should we expect? Author George Stone writes with a light touch around CIA assassinations and black budget skulduggery, and his characters are the standard neurotic '70s horn dogs. Thank God for that! This is a fine, fun time, starting with the gimmick cover where the actual title is inside on a spread. Imagine that kind of ballyhoo for a novel nowadays.

My only real complaint is that there isn't enough snow! We get a snowmobile chase through the flurried streets of NYC and our sexy journalista heroine cross country skies her way through DC, but otherwise we truly don't get enough of a sense of the BLIZZARD'S scale. It's all over before we know it, and while the pace and economy are appreciated we could have done with just a little bit more. Blizzard might not go over the top to a world beater but that's just fine, it's enough that it's competent and satisfying.

Corgi Books edition, 1979

For a very pleasant disaster thriller, BLIZZARD earns three snowflakes out of four:

Dell Publishing, 1979 (original pub. 1977)