This one was wildly interesting. I enjoyed it so much. It was witty and smart and enthralling. Super Good read.

I think I'm enjoying thinking about this book more than I liked reading it.

This dark, dry-witted, satirical look at the physiological aspects of a modern workplace is not for everyone. It's weird, and yet, so compelling. Similar in tone to Several People Are Typing.

Could we be looking at a new sub-genre of workplace horror? This would be a solid entry.

I don’t think that I “get” this book the way I’m supposed to. I ended with more questions that I had going on, and none of the questions seem to have answers. I felt uncomfortable at times, which detracted from my pleasure.

I received an advance copy. All thoughts are my own.

Sean Adams' THE THING IN THE SNOW is brilliant in its dry, sarcastic look at the inane tasks and pointless hierarchies of the typical office. Of course, the office in question is located in an unnamed, isolated, and freezing environment, but the office humor hits just the same.

A fan of Adams' debut, THE HEAP, I thoroughly enjoyed THE THING IN THE SNOW for it's subtle mysteries and eccentric (and relatable) characters. Perfect for fans of Kevin Wilson or Jesse Andrews.

What in the ever-lovin' did I just read??? Or .... try to read ....
This one actually hurt my head and possibly killed off a brain cell or two.

This is a story about the absurdity of work. The Northern Institute, located in a remote part of the world and surrounded by ice and snow, was once a bustling research facility. But following an incident — the nature of which is unclear — its staff has been reduced to three people: Gibbs, Cline, and their supervisor, Hart. Their responsibilities are limited: keep the Institute operational in the event that research is ever to resume there. Each week, they receive a set of tasks from Kay, the Institute’s leader, via helicopter. And each week, Hart must report on their progress on the tasks as well as if any of them are suffering from the mysterious snow sickness.

The tasks are mundane — checking if the doors make unusual noises when they open or whether the floors in all of the rooms of the Institute are flat — but Hart, finally in a leadership role, takes them very seriously, even if he suspects Gibbs and Cline don’t always respect him. Then, outside the windows of the Institute, they spot something: a thing in the snow. Gibbs and Cline are obsessed with the thing in the snow, even though they can’t tell what exactly it is or if it may be moving. At first resistant, Hart begins to cater to their obsession, spending increasingly more time focused on the thing. But sometimes it is hard to tell how and whether that time is passing. And he can’t tell if the thing may be a prank being played by Gilroy, the one remaining original researcher still at the facility, or something quite serious. As the thing in the snow occupies more and more of his attention, Hart feels his control, over his time, his job, and even his own mind, may be slipping away.

This was an unusual, in the best way, book — highly engaging and thought-provoking as it explores the inanities of what is both a singular and universal workplace.

This book is, at its heart, a story about work: the ways people can allow work to define them and the ways they tend to tell themselves stories about the importance of that work — even when, objectively, the tasks seem inconsequential or even ridiculous. In this respect, this novel — frequently absurd and often quite funny — is one of the most trenchant and incisive examinations of the nature of work in the modern age. To Hart, being the leader of the small team is central to his identity and he creates an elaborate narrative about his role, his relationship to his direct reports and his boss, and his leadership that seems to exist mostly in his head. Nevertheless, he remains stubbornly attached to it, interpreting all evidence, even that which would seem to undermine his beliefs, in a way that furthers his narrative.

The book also adeptly portrays how, in the absence of information, Hart, Gibbs, and Cline develop increasingly outlandish theories that they convince one another are plausible about the thing in the snow. The author excels at capturing how this dynamic is fueled, in part, by Hart’s growing feelings of disorientation as the passage of time becomes increasingly elusive for him, all while building a sense of dread about what is really happening at the Institute. Finally, I appreciated the running gag about the series of novels that Hart was reading in his spare time — about a former top executive trying to write a book about leadership that finds himself regularly in the center of dangerous and unbelievable situations where he needs to save the day. This touch captures the humor of the book and how the author uses it to highlight the absurdity of both Hart and his situation.

Highly recommended!

Published by William Morrow on January 3, 2023

This strange story is filled with the low-key humor that comes from transplanting characters who might be at home in The Office or Severance to an arctic research station. The station has been closed but not abandoned. Only four people haunt the empty building. Gilroy is the only remaining researcher. Without lab equipment, he conducts his research by staring into space and making notes. He wants to “get in touch with the cold,” which he envisions as a malicious entity whose “end goal” is “a full-blown castration of the soul.” The other three are maintenance workers who perform such important tasks as opening and closing doors to determine whether they make noise and, if so, to record the volume and source of the noise so that repairs can be scheduled.

As the supervisor of the three maintenance workers, Hart completes the paperwork associated with their assignments (filling in the blank that follows such questions as “How many chairs need replacement?” after they sit on each chair and shift from side to side). Hart places the completed forms in a drop box on the roof. Pat, his boss, dispatches a weekly helicopter to collect the forms and drop off new assignments.

Hart is convinced that their work is of the utmost importance. Researchers might die if they fail to identify work surfaces that are not perfectly flat (the tragic accidents and ensuing chaos he envisions are imaginative but implausible). Hart is sometimes paralyzed by the fear of making an error. His coworkers do not seem to share that fear; they’re simply unmotivated.

Hart believes he is locked in a power struggle with Gibbs, who clearly (and perhaps correctly) thinks she can lead the team more capably than Hart. Cline regards himself as an artist, but he doesn’t ask for art supplies to be delivered on the weekly supply run because he’s not sure he wants to paint a landscape of snow.

The tasks assigned to Hart’s team are so pointless that Hart has lost track of whether the team has done them before. They often need to start over because they become distracted and can’t recall, for example, whether they rolled all the window shades in a particular room up and down. Hart wonders whether the nature of monotonous work might “propel it straight past a casual memory into the arena of trauma, where it would likely be repressed?”

The concept of inept workers struggling to perform tedious make-work chores is funny, but the nature of the workplace adds to the novel’s humor. After a windy night, the workers see something in the snow. They can’t identify it. They aren’t sure whether it moves when they aren’t watching it. When they stare at it, hours elapse. In fact, lost hours are common in the facility, at least for Hart, who can never remember how he spent his weekends. In fact, Hart has lost track of how long the team has been working at the facility.

When Hart sends Pat a Post-It note asking if she knows about the thing in the snow, she asks for more information. The three workers quarrel about who should prepare a description. Rather than collaborating, they decide to resolve their differences with a writing contest, then argue about who wrote the best description of a lamp. Their dysfunction as members of a team is hilarious, although instantly recognizable to anyone who has been part of a dysfunctional team. Pat’s eventual response to the question about the thing in the snow produces something approaching panic, followed by another series of failed experiments.

In addition to mocking make-work jobs and teams that can’t master the art of collaboration, The Thing in the Snow questions the concept of leadership. Hart is ridiculously impressed with himself because he supervises two subordinates in a pointless job. He reads a series of novels that are meant to provide instruction or inspiration for leaders, but they fail to transform Hart into something he is not. A reader might suspect that the endless supply of “How to Be a Leader” books are equally useless. Still, the plots of the leadership novels that Hart reads are so outlandish that I would probably read them.

A contracted wellness provider whose basic care only measures body temperature within a range of 3 degrees (premium care offers whole numbers; with platinum care you get decimals) offers some of the novel's funniest moments. A story that draws humor from absurdity doesn’t need to make sense, but Sean Adams impressed me with an ending that explains why the three maintenance people and the lone researcher are really working at the facility. The novel deliberately leaves lingering questions that add to the fun. In the end, I think The Thing in the Snow is about the need to find purpose, or at least to feel a purpose, in work or in life. When a goofy story turns out to make a meaningful point, I have to recommend it.

RECOMMENDED

I will be withholding my review until Harper gives their Harper Collins union workers a fair contract. Thank you again for the copy.

The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams is a highly recommended novel which is a satirical and psychological examination of the workplace.

The Northern Institute is a seven story research facility in an environment of permanent snow and ice. The researchers have all left the building and three caretakers, Hart, the supervisor, Gibbs, and Cline, and one mysterious researcher, Gilroy, are left in the building. Hart, Gibbs, and Cline do weekly tasks assigned by Kay to keep the building in working order. These are sent to them in a folder along with their weekly supplies which are dropped off via a weekly helicopter. Their weekly tasks are mundane, repetitious assignments, such as checking every door in the building for squeaks, etc, or sit on every chair to ensure its stability.

After opening their day with coffee and light conversation in Hart's office, the three begin their tasks. They usually start with the first floor, the first two floors are buried in the snow, and work their way upwards. Hart embraces his role as the leader, so when Gibbs and Cline bring up the thing in the snow, he isn't thriller about it and finds it an unnecessary distraction. Those two, however, are mesmerized by it. But then it seems that other things might be a bit off in the building. Are the lights really flickering oddly? Is the thing moving?

Hart is the narrator of the novel, so we experience and view everything through his perceptions and point of view. He is also the only developed character. The pace of the novel is slow and plodding throughout, but is surprisingly appealing and humorous, especially if you have ever experienced work place drama and distractions. There are many things that could be "the thing in the snow" at work places.

This novel is a pure satirical and psychological study of isolation, obsession, ineffective bureaucracy, distractions, and meaningless tasks in a work place. The narrative takes, examining isolation, obsession, and paranoia in a mundane, repetitious environment. It is not an action packed horror novel or even especially creepy. It does tackle the toll of monotony and isolation in one's life and can be surprisingly funny at times.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of William Morrow.




The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Edelweiss, and Amazon.

Sean Adam’s follow up to his debut The Heap expounds further on his satire of pointless bureaucracy and mindless obedience to authority. As in his first outing, Adams places the setting in an amorphous future wasteland containing remnants of a decimated civilization. Even the name of the abandoned research facility is meaningless. The Northern Institute is stripped bare of its own history and significance, now a shell surrounded by obliterating snow. The novel’s characters are roughly hewn with no backgrounds or depth, serving as drones for the repetitive plot about inane maintenance tasks. The narrator has willingly reduced his own identity to that of a robotic, prototypical middle-manager. There is a faceless authority that disinterestedly deposits provisions and assigns tasks for the Institute’s caretakers—as remote and inaccessible as any supreme power. Without the usual markers of time and physical borders, the free-floating existence of the inhabitants requires the creation of arbitrary measures to assuage existential anxiety. When an unknown object suddenly appears, it disrupts the entire system, leaving the unmoored characters to careen into obsession and paranoia. The Thing in the Snow is itself a maddening exercise—the reader is lulled into a stupor by the granular description of boring assignments and circular interactions. A commentary on the necessity of basic curiosity and adaptability, Adam’s second novel succeeds at being at once stultifying and captivating.

Thanks to the author, Harper Collins and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

This was very weird, though surprisingly engaging and had a very dry sense of humor throughout. I’m not totally sure that I got the point of the book, but I still appreciated the story by the end.

The story is told solely through Hart’s point of view. He is the team leader, but he often has doubts that he is doing a good job in that role. He spends his off time reading a series of books about a man who is a very good leader, hoping to learn from him. He has an interesting relationship with the other two characters who he spends basically no time with outside of the time they are working on their assignments together. Hart tries to keep things moving along throughout the story, but the Thing in the snow becomes such an obsession for the group that eventually he starts to question his sanity.

We only see the other characters through Hart’s narrative, so they felt a bit underdeveloped. I thought Gilroy was the most interesting out of all of them. Gibbs was also interesting in her attempts to understand what the thing in the snow was. Once the thing becomes an obsession with Gibbs and Cline, their characters became a bit more defined. But this book wasn’t really about the characters.

The main bulk of the story was taken up with the mundane and rather pointless tasks the three were set by management. For example, they spent a week testing all of those chairs in the seven story building. Another week was spent testing whether the tables were still flat. It was kind of fascinating that the author is still able to engage the reader in the story while the characters are doing such boring work. Even with the discovery of the Thing in the snow, their lives are not really interrupted all that much. It was also interesting that Hart didn’t engage with anyone outside of work hours except for the occasional run in with Gilroy. I was able to imagine that his life outside of the institute wasn’t very different than in.

I was somewhat disappointed that I never felt like the group was in danger. I kept expecting things to ramp up a bit and become more creepy or more of a thriller than it did. It just sort of plods along at a steady pace with some frantic parts towards the end. The ending was a little disappointing as well. I just wanted a bit more out of this book.

This was an interesting story that I would recommend to those of you who are into satire especially as it relates to the workplace. It is an interesting look at the mundaneness of the work world and of people’s lives in general.

This unique book will have you questioning what is going on during the entire book. While some reviewers mention feeling a lot of dread and suspense, I didn't feel much of that until the last 25%. There is a lot of quirky humor in the interactions between the three employees and because it's told from the perspective of only person, you're never quite sure of the whole story. Overall I enjoyed reading this book, it's certainly different than most books I pick up.

This hypnotic mind-bender is sophisticated fun, belied by a generally stark and monotonous setting reminiscent of The Overlook. Fans of psychological horror like The Shining and the Southern Reach trilogy will revel in Sean Adams' atmospheric tension and self-referencing narrative.

The Thing in the Snow is a deceptively simple story that manages to simultaneously invoke elements of philosophy, science, fantasy and horror. Despite the broad scope of the narrative, the characters and events feel fully developed and authentic. Where VanDerMeer's Annihilation was intriguing but obtuse, this story is humorous and transparent. Where King's The Institute was unpolished and inconsistent, The Thing in the Snow is as smooth as a snowdrift. Where Malerman's Inspection was cynical and abrupt, this book portrays hope and an indefinite conclusion to the events described in its pages.

The plot itself involves some elements of fantasy juxtaposed against the tedious reality of office work, albeit a comically distorted reality. This aspect, as well as the story's strong philosophical content, reminded me of Haruki Murakami's brilliant fantasy adventure Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, though this one stays more firmly in the world of reality.

If you've ever theorized about the nature of memory or wondered about the ontological significance of deja vu; if you're fascinated by concepts like time dilation; if you're a fan of vivid, creative stories--

Clock out early and bundle up with a glass of fortified wine for your stay at the Northern Institute.

Big thanks to William Morrow and NetGalley for the ARC!

I started this hesitantly, but ended up enjoying it quite a bit. I liked the suspense and watching many of the characters.

Thanks very much for the free ARC for review!!

A humorous rendition of the "isolated in a mysterious and vaguely abstract location" concept, and manages to be consistently very entertaining despite being a novel centered around completing mundane tasks. I can't remember the last novel I've read that's as overtly comedic as this (which isn't to say it's entirely a comedy), but the style reminded me a bit of Fredrik Backman's Anxious People. Outside the literature world, it could also be compared favorably to the Portal videogames.

In any event, the absurdist angles of this novel and the strange speculative fiction setting it takes place in helped make it a winner for me. I also couldn't help but be charmed by some of the goofy emotion in the ending. Because so little about the state of the outside world is explored (we have no idea of the time period or location in the world), the novel is able to create a bit of optimism purely through relationships and personal journey without being weighed down by sci-fi specifics (don't get me wrong, I love all sorts of sci-fi. This was just unique in the genre to me, if you'd consider it sci-fi. It exists somewhere in the spec-fic realm, surely).

The Thing in the Snow is filled from the very first page with a pervasive sense of dread and fear. Three people, two men and a woman, are caretakers in a large multi story research facility so far in the north the first two floors are always under the snow. Their only contact is a weekly helicopter landing on the roof with food, supplies and their weekly assignment. They have never been told why hundreds of researchers were all suddenly evacuated or when, if ever, they will return. Their assigned tasks are mundane and boring. One week they have to check every floor tile in the huge building to see if any need replacement. They are forbidden to go outside for any reason. But when they see a large dark object out in the snow, they become obsessed with it and begin to argue with each other about what it is, where it came from, and whether or not they should go out in the snow to find out. And the reader knows that is a very bad idea.

This was a very interesting book. It was set at The Northern Institute, a mostly deserted compound in an unidentified place covered in snow. Three people serve as a skeleton staff to caretake the building after all the researches were pulled. They have mundane assignments delivered each week via envelope from a helicopter that picks up and drops off communication.

It's engaging and has a wry sense of humor throughout. I just kept waiting for it to get creepy or weird and it never really did. It was more the mundaneness of being in a desolated place and dealing with HR issues, haha. I just wanted a bit more. Rounding up from 3.5. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!