Snow

Gemma Files is a Toronto-based free-lance writer.

When sudden snowstorms envelop a Montreal building, they force together
a score of disparate people: the Mayor’s ravishing wife, office-party
guests, two elderly voyeurs (both cantankerous, one psychic),
bodyguards, hookers, window-washers—and their tangled relationships.
Slowly, the power fails. Left in the dark, they shed their inhibitions,
burn everything there is to burn, and wait to die.

One woman remarks: “This snow. It’s like Moira Shearer in The Red
Shoes, remember? It can’t stop. It just dances on and on and on.”
Unfortunately, Holden’s plot tends to do the same, although her
colloquial, present-tense style is direct and occasionally poetic. The
characters seem ill-defined, their motives unsure. Even a mere 100 pages
into the book, the reader is exhausted from trying to sympathize with
them.

According to the jacket blurb, Holden wrote Snow after being inspired
by two newspaper stories. Converting fact into fiction, however, is
often an unrewarding process, as this well-executed but ultimately
unsatisfying book shows.