Sleepers in the Snow, by Joanne Harris is a thoughtful, engrossing novel, which on the surface is a study in the complexities of dementia, but on a deeper level, it really can be read as an updated and inverted work of folk horror. It is not a thriller in the traditional sense.
Set in the isolated, chilly Yorkshire moors, Sleepers in the Snow is also a kind of two hander – a concept that focuses on two primary characters for the bulk of the story. But in this case, the two hands consist of an unnamed older man who, after a troubled personal life, buys a cottage in those moors in an effort to remake his life; and a towering electric transmitting pylon tower practically outside our protagonist’s front door.
“It must have been over three hundred feet; the largest pylon he’d ever seen. Everything else was background. The house, the hills, the sky itself, reduced almost to nothing. And now he could hear its resonance; a kind of yawning into the sky, a sound on the edge of perception that set all of his fillings on edge. And there was a smell; a metallic taint in the scented summer air; something like old metalwork along an old canal. A scent like earth and blood on the air. A scent like silent thunder.”
As if living in the shadow of that metallic phallic monstrosity weren’t daunting enough, on his first night in his new house, a bright green tennis ball appears at his front door, disappears, and then reappears – and that’s just the beginning: the unnamed protagonist hears voices from the “resonance” of the wires, a disconnected landline phone rings, he sees an old man reflected in a kitchen window. A mere fourteen pages in and we are already headed for Twilight Zone territory!
His cottage purchase includes not simply the structure itself, but all the contents of the previous owners as well. Conveniently, the men’s clothes he finds fit him, there is plenty of food stored and a trove of books, perfect for winter reading. But near his bed is a bookshelf which contains diaries left behind by the couple who lived there before. Once he picks them up, he can scarcely put them down.
Written by Arthur and Caroline Sanderson, the diaries, while offering insight into the lives of his predecessors, raise more questions as the story proceeds. Where did they end up? Are they deceased?
He drives the rough road to the nearby village, Lyke. He’s going to ask around for more details on the Sandersons and plans to donate a slew of Caroline’s clothing. His encounters in the village are just a bit off kilter although he feels like he’s made some progress. But the weirdness continues. He starts keeping a diary of his own.
He finds more tennis balls, keeps seeing a dog that is supposed to be dead, and when he opens the closet where the donated clothes had been kept … he finds them all back in their place. In addition, the pervasive presence of the pylon serves as a backdrop to his increasingly disoriented existence. He turns on a TV set that rarely gets reception, but this time, a “chat” show is on, with an obnoxiously loud emcee.
“And yet, he could still hear the pylon, behind the interference; a sound that was like the fur on his tongue; the fuzz on a peach – or a tennis ball. He couldn’t imagine ignoring it. It was a perpetual earworm. And yet, there had been whole days when he had forgotten the sound; had allowed it to be eclipsed by music, or TV, or the sounds of the moor. What was wrong with him? he thought. What was suddenly wrong with the world?”
That pylon. His disassociation. The Sandersons, and the stories he’s hearing about their fate. (Grim.) On top of the increasing stress he is feeling, when hikers pass through his yard, he feels violated. But despite that superficial response to his privacy being invaded, he’s begun meeting “people” in the vicinity. What kind of people? An entry in Arthur’s diary chills him: “There are walkers on these moors. The word was filled with menace. Witches. Watchers. Walkers. He hoped they wouldn’t come his way.”
One day, feeling a kind of magnetic pull from the pylon, he walks the short distance to it from his house, through the snow. He becomes disoriented, and struggling as he makes his way home, “… he thought he could hear the sound of something raking the ground – something like a giant claw, furtive and insectile. Once more he imagined the pylon stretching out its mantis-limbs at the running man on the ground, toying with him like a cat…”
Winter arrives, and with it a spate of new unnerving peculiarities. Starlings fall from the sky en masse: “From the window, he could see the fruit of the sky’s bizarre harvest – hundreds, no, thousands – of fallen birds, and among them, dozens of tennis balls, scattered over the garden, the path, and far away into the heather.”
It becomes increasingly clear what’s happening to our unnamed, increasingly deluded subject, but Harris keeps us engaged, eager to turn the page. Man versus pylon! Moors! What is “real” and what is a mental manifestation of one man’s increasingly muddled consciousness?
Harris ties it together – right around the time the reader does too. Reading Sleepers in the Snow feels downright claustrophobic, despite the vast expanses of the moors. But there’s no getting away: in this novel, escaping one’s mind is not an option.
Peter Handel has been writing about crime fiction since the early 1990s. His reviews, interviews, and profiles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Reader’s Journal, The Rap Sheet and CrimeReads. Join his Substack here.
