Phil's Reviews > Spirit

Masterton wrote many horror novels, all with widely different story arcs, never falling into formulaic tales. Spirit nonetheless constitutes something very different, even for him. Perhaps the best way to introduce Spirit is as a mashup of a ghost story and Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen. Further, you could call this historical fiction as it starts in 1940 and finishes up in the early 1950s.

Our main protagonist, Lizzie, starts the novel playing with her two younger sisters (Lizzie is 10 yo) in the yard of their rambling old house in Connecticut one winter morning. The youngest sister, Peggy, seems to the it in a hind and seek game, but the two other sisters cannot find her. After some time, she is discovered drowned, beneath the ice in the swimming pool behind the house. Needless to day, the girls are devastated as are the parents. In fact, Lizzie's rather fragile mother soon becomes institutionalized and her father a shadow of his former self.

Flash forward a few years and once again we follow Lizzie and Laura (the other sister) in their exploits around the small town. Lizzie keeps seeing a girl dressed in white around town and is sure that she is little Peggy, albeit an older Peggy, and keeps hearing her speak phrases from The Snow Queen, but she always is just out of reach. In the middle of June that year, the town priest, who had been molesting several children in town, was found nearly dead of severe frostbite and dies shortly thereafter. How could a man die of frostbite in the middle of June? The mystery deepens...

I have never read The Snow Queen but Masterton gives us the tale in fits and starts as the story progresses. As the years slowly pass, more odd deaths occur, where people known to the sisters die in bizarre ways-- frozen so completely they fall to pieces or explode. What is causing the deaths? Is the little girl in while really Peggy, returned from the dead? If so, what does she want?

Overall, not a bad read, but rather long winded and this could be classified as slow horror. I like Masterton, but if he dropped the depictions of the cloths people wore, etc., this would lose 50 pages. Entertaining, but as it wore on, I found it harder to suspend my sense of disbelief, which is essential for a good ghost story. Further, the ending, especially after such a long build up, was rather anticlimactic. Still, not a bad tale, but Masterton has done better. 2.5 ghostly starts, rounding up for the foo!