The Lodge at Hightown is ready for its grand opening, and handsome, honest, wonderful hotel manager Bob Coombs is afraid his sleazy boss Everett may have cut one too many corners building his winter wonderland. The intimidating architectural writer sent by the NYT has already pointed out cracked walls and a bad foundation. And now someone smells eggs in the basement ...
Comparisons are helpful. Robert Weverka's Avalanche, published just two years before, manages twice the action in half the pages, and scratches that disaster itch with evocative passages on snowfall and ice layers. Cohen doesn't really bother with any of the science behind his disaster, and in fact (spoilers here), an avalanche isn't even really the big event! It goes back to Everett's glad handing deal with his brother-in-law who owns a propane heating business, and maybe didn't do the best job installing the furnaces in the basement. We'll have to slog through hundreds of pages of melodrama and dark hints of imminent destruction before we get any payoff ... though Cohen does start things off with a pointless scene of Coombs witnessing the big explosion as the lodge goes up in flames, before flashing back for a long, long build up.
Some characters are more successful than others. Dr. Feldman and his wife Miriam are lovely, as is heiress ski bunny Ann Heath. Coombs is too perfect by half, a boring cardboard superman who is failed by everyone around him. The depressed artist Souvaroff and the bitchy Hollywood starlet Patricia Sindt (Sindt? SINNED? Get it?) are flat as well, and Sindt's death is petty and ridiculous - Cohen has her body crammed into a toilet bowl by the blast. There are too many other guests and employees who make little impression. Cohen's attempts at weaving a grand tapestry bore me! Even his final destruction of the lodge lacks verisimilitude, failing to tune us in to that sublime disaster frequency, that terrible knowledge an author can share with readers about just how wrong things can go and are going, right now! But this work lacks immediacy, urgency, or even any purpose.
Coomb's steady gal Kay works for the lodge doing graphology on potential employees - that's handwriting analysis! She doesn't seem too good at her job, what with the quality of workers who slip through, but Coombs stands by her work. It's an interesting bit of midcentury flavor, at least.
In an oddity similar to Belmont/Tower's advertising for Rochelle T. Larkin's The Raging Flood, there's an ad for this very title right on the front page, credited to an author named "Max Steele!" What was going on in the cheapo publishers back then? Paul Patchick's Eruption gets an entry in the back page ads, if we want to be reminded of other, better books we could be reading. For another odd note, Cohen's own website claims that this book was the basis for the 1979 disaster film of which Weverka's book was an adaptation ... but this just seems flatly incorrect.
Cohen's Avalanche earns a pitiable 1/4 for wasting our time. It's a lovely cover by Zebra anyways, with the title text embossed.
Zebra Books, 1980
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