The Snowman's Children (eBook)

The Snowman's Children
by Glen Hirshberg

About the Book:
The Snowman's Children is a poignant, psychologically intense first novel that tells the story of an incident from one man's childhood in the 1970s, when a serial killer called The Snowman stalked the streets of suburban Detroit.

The incident, a result of good but woefully misguided juvenile intentions, forced his family to leave their home, and eventually forced him, at age twenty-nine, to return to his hometown in search of three old friends.

Reminiscent of both To Kill a Mockingbird in its touching portrait of childhood, and the beautifully written brand of suspense that calls to mind Smilla's Sense of Snow, The Snowman's Children is an unusually controlled and original novel that establishes Hirshberg as an important new voice in American literature.

Glen Hirshberg was born in Detroit in 1966, and grew up there and in San Diego. He received his B.A. from Columbia University, where he won the Bennett Cerf Prize for Best Fiction, and his M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Montana.

Glen's first novel, The Snowman's Children, was published by Carroll and Graf in 2002. The Two Sams, published by Carroll and Graf in October 2003, collects his celebrated ghost stories which have received multiple International Horror Guild and World Fantasy Award nominations.

Glen Hirshberg lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife and children.

"The story switches from the year 1996, when the adult Mattie returns to his home town, back to 1976, 77, 78, as the sweetness of childhood played itself out. . . . This technically perfect, beautifully rendered childhood is what makes The Snowman's Children so powerful . . . and I'm sure I won't be the only one to suggest that The Snowman's Children is a hybrid of two genres—the first, a careful social realism; the second, a free-for-all Gothic-horror jamboree."
— Carolyn See, The Washington Post

"[Hirshberg] has a real gift for capturing the emotional power of childhood friendships."
— Booklist

"Haunting and sharply rendered."
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The Snowman's Children ends with nothing and nobody unshattered, least of all the reader. Its world spins with a sad inexorability that is at once achingly familiar and disturbingly alien. The book is wise, intelligent, thick with arresting imagery, and infused with an accelerating gush of dread."
— Bryan Di Salvatore, author of A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward

"Glen Hirshberg, already an expert teller of ghost stories, has written a dark, haunting first novel that is a poignant and disquieting coming of age story."
— Ellen Datlow, co-editor of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror

"Glen Hirshberg has written a dense, intricate, and eerily beautiful novel about the perils of childhood, families, friendships, and real monsters. You fall under the spell of this book, as if falling backwards into a bank of soft, deep snow."
— Kelly Link, author of Stranger Things Happen