WINTER STALK

by James L. Stowe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1979

A lurid, lousy first novel that's all set-up with nothing delivered at the climax. David and Kate Meredith and baby Brian are caught in a blizzard in New Mexico on their way to a ski resort. When they find a strange speckling on Brian's throat and chest, they can't locate a doctor or a clinic--and David has a disquieting run-in with two strangers. Then an odd fellow appears in the snow, aiming a bow and arrow at their car and David skids half off a hill. This fellow is a hermit who lives nearby with an older woman. They try to save David's car, but it slips off the hill, so hermit Michael takes them into his snowbound house. Kate has a slippery grip on sanity, having lost two earlier children, and Michael has an explosive sex mania focused on deers and sharp arrowheads. Is baby Brian dying? The original two strangers now show up and explain that they have been empowered by Senator Melchor to recover Brian--who is the child of the Senator's Patty Hearst-type daughter (she died recently with a drug-smuggling ring she'd joined). Crazy Michael disarms the two men and sends them away in a rattletrap car. When they return later in the dead of night, he kills them both, then stuns David and leaves him to freeze in the woods and goes back to rape Kate. If we tell you that he is shot to death by his mistress, who is also his mother, will we be telling too much? And that's it--lust, perversion, and murder, just heaped up with no sense of drama, style, or character.

Pub Date: June 1, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1979

Categories: FICTION