Thank you Anne Cater, for asking me to join the blog tour for Feral Snow a self publisher novel by Mark Lowes, available from Amazon, from 28th September 2020.
Feral Snow – The Blurb
Alone and stranded in the Arctic wasteland, would you risk your life to save a stranger or try to get home?
Paul is a father-to-be; traumatised by his past, he’s terrified of becoming a
father after his own beat him until he was unilaterally deaf.
While working as a freelance cameraman in the Arctic, he’s caught in a blizzard, separated from his crew, and falls into a chasm. Alone, and waiting for death to come, personal demons plague his mind.
When a young native girl falls into the chasm with him, Paul must learn how to accept responsibility and what it takes to give your life for a child.
Our Author – Mark Lowes
Mark Lowes is a former teacher, current early childhood educator, and future dad. He lives in Cardiff, Wales, UK, and is sometimes found lamenting over how awful his football team is. While he’s not working with deaf children and their families, he’s writing dark and twisty fiction.
His writing, so he’s told, is a mix between Chuck Palahniuk Josh Malerman and Ernest Hemingway (although Mark retains, all this praise is too much too high). He loves edge-of-your-seat fiction, novels that make you think deeper about the world but will also terrify you and live the world through the protagonist, experiencing every detail. He’s a fan of description, somewhat a lost art nowadays, and has a soft spot for a dark, unreliable narrator.
You can find him on Twitter @StrugglingMJ where he would be excited to hear your views.
Mark is the winner of Litopia’s Pop-Up Submissions and of a pitch contest at the Cardiff Book Festival.
My Review – Feral Snow
This book, will send shivers down your spine, the cold, the chill and that’s just after Mark’s set the scene and you’re reading about the windswept artic that goes on forever. The relentless cold that actually feels like its getting in your bones, brrrrrr.
Paul Hanson is a cameraman, his wife Annie is very pregnant – on the verge of giving birth pregnant and his friend Mike has been let down by his usual guy and needs Paul’s help to go and film, in the arctic. He knows it takes 10 days to get there, so the same to get home, and do the filming. Paul knows it means he will miss the birth of his first child. He claims they need the money – but really Paul is running, hiding, he’s scared. Scared of being a father, scared that he will turn into his father, an aggressive, hurtful man who made Paul’s childhood hell. Annie doesn’t know the real truth and it takes Paul and his experience in the artic to make him realise a lot of things and that firstly he needs to trust Annie and tell her the truth.
Paul starts filming himself after his fall into a deep crevasse, after he becomes seperated from the filming team. He’s injured, but determined. Then Nanny a child whos being chased by a Polar Bear, the very animal hes there to film, joins him, they quickly make a firm friendship, built on their time together and their fight to survive.
They need every ounce of energy and knowledge to get through this, will they make it? Will Paul meet his unborn baby? Will Annie understand the need to go on the trip? Will she ever see the video he makes, tracking his thoughts and journey before the battery dies?
Now, I have been to Iceland, the edge of the artic and it was -12 when I was there, my feet went numb even with all the winter gear on and I could sit by a fire and warm them back up. This book literally gave me the shivers just thinking about the cold, the ice, being trapped. Its unnerving but compelling and theres a urgency to it, the need to escape. Mark Lowes has created such a scene in his writing its hard not to feel the chill in your bones.
I would normally ask you to follow the rest of the blog tour, but I am the last blogger this time – so I hope you have enjoyed reading other reviews and enjoy reading Feral Snow.
To Buy Feral Snow https://www.amazon.co.uk/Feral-Snow-Mark-Lowes/dp/1838229019/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1606309115&sr=8-1
@StrugglingMJ @AnneCater @RandomTTours #FeralSnow
