A Colder Home by Jillian Maria blends elements of found fiction, haunted house stories, metafiction, and Young Adult slasher tropes to create a vibrant new contribution to horror. While a friend and I have both complimented it as a popcorn read, I’m happy to say that Maria brings the same attentiveness to deeper themes that’s at work in her novella, Curiouser and . . .. Although Curiouser clearly demonstrated Maria’s promise as a writer, with Colder, you can definitely see where her work has matured, with Maria both returning to familiar themes and introducing new ones. In many ways, Colder feels written for film, with a series of creative death scenes and atmospheric moments that would be even more effective on screen than they are off. That said, it’ll be a hit with fans of written fiction as well, especially Sarah McKnight’s Carousel, Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw, and Courtney Gould’s The Dead and the Dark.
Sometimes I just want to sit down and watch a bunch of stereotypical teenagers get murdered with a chainsaw one by one in increasingly gruesome ways.* That’s not to say that Colder‘s cast is stereotypical–Maria fills out the roster not with your typical jock, joker, prep, and rebel characters, but instead with a queer cast of misfits. Nonetheless, Maria is very clearly drawing on popular horror archetypes with intention, deliberately leaning into subgenre tropes in a way that emphasizes both her genre awareness and the playfulness of Colder itself. The book follows a young filmmaker named Cleo as she and a group of friends spend a night filming a horror movie in an isolated house during a blizzard. When the haunts in Cleo’s script are beat-out by the seemingly real ghosts infesting the rental, the friends’ plans spiral 
Cleo’s movie will be the first since the death of her father, and much of Colder focuses on Cleo’s experiences of grief. It’s here–as well as through Cleo’s overall characterization–that Maria really deepens the narrative. While we know early on what Cleo is dealing with, elements of her backstory remain somewhat mysterious, revealed over the course of the novel in the same way that we’re gradually clued-in to the identities and motives of the ghosts. While the specifics of Cleo’s background and the answers to the house’s mysteries aren’t necessarily intertwined in a concrete way, thematically, there’s a resonance between the protagonist’s experiences and what’s happening around her, adding layers to the text and making Cleo an even more interesting character to follow. Cleo’s supporting cast is drawn in less depth, but not to the novel’s detriment, as it really is a book with Cleo’s specific foibles and trauma at its heart, and many of the ways that Maria approaches character work feel like deliberate choices that root Colder more firmly within specific horror traditions. Standouts among the supporting cast do, however, include Cleo’s crush, Isobel, with whom Cleo shares some moving moments. As a (potential) couple, they’re fun to cheer on, though for readers either worried or eager that Colder is more of a horromantasy, let it be known that romantic concerns are fairly minimal in the novel overall.
I raise my camcorder, peering at the world through the viewfinder. Like this, it’s easy to see everything happening here as a story.
One of the most notable aspects of Colder, and one that inspired my choice to compare it to the books that I do, is its embeddedness in horror culture. Cleo, her friends, and Colder itself are deliberately referential, quipping about horror movies and name-dropping specific films and characters. As a reader, I’m fairly neutral on the practice of name-dropping (although I do tend to prefer indirect homages), but one thing I do feel Colder does in a unique and intriguing way is invoke film technique directly. Maria does this both through Cleo, whose strong voice informs how the reader experiences the events of the book, and through the use of epigraphs at the start of each chapter that describe particular film shots and techniques popularly used in horror movies. The descriptions are very well done and not only did I learn some things from the epigraphs, but they mirror very well the mood of the scenes that follow them. This has the effect of layering the reading experience in compelling ways, heightening tension throughout. Atmosphere in general is a strength of the book, and it’s a fun read to let yourself sink into and imagine through the mechanism of a film lens. One especially strong moment toward the end of the book sees Cleo revisiting a memory through the frame of a viewfinder. For me, it was a visually powerful moment and one that was strikingly cinematic in a positive way.
That said, if Colder has a flaw it’s what sometimes feels like the story’s desire to escape its pages and transition instead to the silver screen. While Maria absolutely makes use of the ability of prose to show her protagonist’s rich interior world and unique point of view, the final chapters are slightly frenetic and some of the revelations a tad convoluted. The more I thought on Colder‘s conclusion, the more I became convinced that it wasn’t that the approach didn’t work, but that it was an approach that would work much better on screen. It’s not that Colder has a disappointing ending–there’s a lot to love, especially in terms of some truly grotesque and creative death scenes, as well as some poignant character moments–but that a lot of what Maria does at the novel’s end works best if you imagine the narrative as film.
A Colder Home combines deep character work and rich thematics with a fun, campy horror framework–not something that’s easy to pull off. Jillian Maria’s accomplished prose is not only accessible and flows well, but is also at turns beautiful and evocative (I’d highlighted a number of potential quotations to share as part of the review before settling on the one above). With the potential to appeal to a broad audience of horror fans, queer readers, and readers who just love a good yarn, well told, A Colder Home is one I can well imagine being a big hit.
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*In fiction, on a movie screen.