Ian R. MacLeod is the author of many critically acclaimed and award-winning novels and short stories, which have been widely anthologized and translated into more than a dozen languages, and span the entire spectrum of fantastic fiction. His novel SONG OF TIME won the Arthur C. Clarke award for the Year's Best Novel, and he has twice won both the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award for Alternative-World Fiction.

Red Snow by Ian R. MacLeod

A 2018 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST HORROR NOVEL

In the aftermath of the last great battle of the American Civil War, a disillusioned Union medic stumbles across a strange figure picking amid the corpses, and his life is changed forever . . .

In the cathedral city of Strasbourg in the years before the French Revolution, a church restorer is commissioned to paint a series of portraits that chart the changing appearance of a beautiful woman over the course of her life, although the woman herself seems ageless . . .

In Prohibition-era New York, an idealistic young Marxist is catapulted into the realms of elite society, and forced to assume the identity of someone who never existed . . .

Red Snow is a novel of love and violence, ideas and dreams, and revolves around the mystery of a monster drawn from humanity's darkest myths which still somehow survives, and thrives, and kills, in this modern age.

CURATOR'S NOTE

I love everything Ian MacLeod writes, but particularly this lyrical, high-concept novel which is also as fun as it is sounds! Come along on this adventure, and be transformed! – Lavie Tidhar

 

REVIEWS

  • "… always manages to take us somewhere unexpected… by turns western adventure, Renaissance horror, political intrigue, dysfunctional family drama, and more."

    – Locus

  • "By turns horrifying and hauntingly beautiful, this epic vampire story is the stuff of real nightmares."

    – Tim Powers

  • "A rich, beautifully written, deftly plotted vampire novel"

    – Goodreads

  • "Red Snow brings new depth and history to some age-old myths. It resonates with the struggle between science and the supernatural, and between good and bad. Fed through a prism which combines the romance of Anne Rice with the vivid realism of Cormac McCarthy, it is a novel of universal questions and the triumph of the human spirit wrapped inside a dark and gripping tale."

    – Risingshadow.net
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

She first came to Ezekiel one winter's evening when he was alone up in his workshop. A creak of the door from the street below. A stir of feet. One of his apprentices? But the presence was too quick, too quiet. A thief? The last of the day was fading, and he realised he'd been working amid the rotting angels by little more than the glow of his gluepot fire. He grasped a pallet knife, telling himself it was probably just the wind, but the figure which emerged at the top of the stairway into his bow-floored workshop was female, and wore a long cloak. In a pale flash of hands, she drew back the hood.

He laid aside the pallet knife with a trembling hand.

"Ezekiel…"

In the rising moon, her exposed hair fell gold across her shoulders in a manner which the more decent ladies of this city would have considered immoral, although he thought he had never seen anything finer—if, that was, you discounted her face. A perfect model for the features of a lost angel, or some unknown saint. Eyes which were almond-shaped. Each slow blink a revelation, and at their green-irised heart a gaze so deep and black. Something about the smile, as well, formed on those full-bowed lips, was like no other smile. In fact, scarcely a smile at all, but some other expression that was neither sadness nor joy. Her skin, in this moon-silvered light, was creamy-pale. But it had a duskiness as well. The craftsman in him briefly wondered if it would be possible to match such a surface with any conceivable tint. If she hadn't been so real, he might have wondered if she had come from some other realm.