White death in the frozen north! The city of Duluth, MN is on the brink of crisis as the storm of the century settles down in a smothering blanket of lethal chill, and author David James puts you there in the middle of the BLIZZARD!
Not to be confused with George Stone's 1977 technothriller of the same title, James' story is gritty slice of life stuff, as the citizens of Duluth find their routines suddenly interrupted by that most innocent of things, a November snow. Kids cheer for a day off school, but nothing doing, and so stolid, cancer riddled Ed Gerlowski slides into the driver's seat of his big yellow bus one last time and drives off into the white nothing ... Ed's not alone, there's a whole cast of solid midcentury characters with names like DeWurth, Jordan, Selzner, Polinski, and a delicious stew of '70s melodrama with adultery, workplace sexism, end-of-the-world parties, and more wracking at our characters' fragile nerves. That storm's worse than we thought, and suddenly Duluth is cut off from its natural gas lines, and then the power plant fails, and now thousands of people are facing the cold hard prospect of freezing to death in their own homes! James slaloms easily between his different threads, giving us the authorities, the media, city workers and the cops ... and US. What's to become of us? Like all the best disaster fiction, James sketches a believable portrait of failing systems and fractured people. There's no cheesy villains or out-of-this-world obstacles, just the implacable forces of nature arrayed against us, the living, and the terrifying simplicity of an all encompassing cold which numbs the body, slows the mind, and kills, kills, kills in ways both dramatic and banal, shocking and predictable. Duluth will be there after the thaw, but not everyone will have made it, and the survivors will be left with broken lives, new beginnings.
If James comes off as a capable author it should be no surprise, for he's actually one of several pseudonyms employed by writer David Hagberg over a long career that also included 20+ entries in the long running Nick Carter series of men's adventure pulp paperbacks, a successful series of technothrillers starring superspy Kirk McGarvey, and assorted other spy, tie-in, and thriller works. Blizzard was one of his first books but he writes with a sure hand here, making the story a pure pleasure to read. Hagberg was from Duluth, by the way, and it's always fun when an author socks it to their hometown.
The copious ad pages in the back feature a blurb for Rochelle Larkin's The Raging Flood featured on this blog just the other day, with an odd detail. For whatever reason, it looks like Larkin almost published her story under the pseudonym of John Pendleton Kennedy, a real American who served as Secretary of the Navy under Millard Fillmore and is notable for his abolitionism and early advocacy of the telegraph, as well as being a man of letters! Was this some kind of misprint, maybe a filler name chosen for pseudonyms not yet finalized and not meant to see print? I have no idea! The folks at cheapie publisher Belmont Tower were full of mysteries.
A final word should go to the cover art: it's simply beautiful, an evocative swirl of snow flurries nearly obscuring the blanketed countryside and Forrest Jordan's imperiled Cessna. Bravo all around for another winning disaster piece from Belmont Tower!
4/4
Belmont Tower Books, 1975
I sure did enjoy David Hagberg’s novels, whether under his own name and under a bunch of pseudonyms. He was one writing motor scooter.
ReplyDeleteHe's stellar, got a couple more of his titles on the pile
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