Eminence Front
Book by Rebecca Rowland (2026)
Note: We read this book as an advanced review copy (ARC) given to our parent companies, everafterbooks.uk and theubergroup.org.
Warning: Do not read this novel during a blizzard.
The coolest thing I noticed about Rebecca Rowland’s Eminence Front is that it reads like a blizzard, the pacing steadily increasing in intensity, crescendoing into a white vortex, before finally abating. Blizzards are creepy; personified in mythology as Old Man Winter and other ice-breathing entities.
Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, who wrote Westerns under the name B.M. Bower, popularized the term cabin-fever in 1918 to describe the intense claustrophobia of life in a cabin, unable to venture out, not even with snowshoes. The shrinking of one’s world to four walls causes certain individuals to snap, their sanity in twain like a broken icicle. For those trapped outside in the elements, well there is always cannibalism as occurred in the Donner Party.
Not only are the frigid, low-visibility, ice-slick weather conditions hazardous, howling and whistling, covering the world that was once comforting in its familiarity, it causes certain people who may already be on the edge to horribly malfunction whether from physical or mental breakdown. What good horror does is magnify real trends. What if sliding on the road and crashing is in fact a sinister event? It is certainly horrifying for the one in the vehicle careening towards possible death.
Welcome to a small suburban neighborhood in Hampden County Massachusetts. The blizzard of the decade is fast approaching. Meet the denizens who inhabit houses on the same street; joined by guilt and others by mere proximity. Each character holds the seeds of shame and resentment within them; the isolating, disorienting nature of the storm is the perfect soil for the germination and rapid growth of necrotizing evil.
Recluse John Stephenson frets he will starve without food delivery. Due to severe anxiety, the kind that has sufferers shaking in a fetal position, he hasn’t set foot outside his front door in half a decade. His lover Louis left him, frustrated by John’s inability to change. Even the orange cat, Jonesy — a clever nod to Jonesy, the cat in Alien — has fled and currently resides in his next-door neighbor Jackie’s house.
Windy Weather, the weather anchor, warns:
“If at all possible, do not leave the safety of your home, especially when the snow is falling.”
John wasn’t planning to go anywhere anyway.
High school history teacher Carol Bennet struggles to deal with her hearing-impaired mother Rose who has dementia, which is an apt subject for horror. The day of the storm, Carol is late to school because when she awoke she found her mother curled up on the ground in near freezing temperatures.
“Carol wrapped a robe around herself and rushed out to retrieve her confused parent, a life-sized battery-powered bunny marching interminably in place even as the gears inside her ground themselves to dust.”
Mother and daughter are locked in a suffocating embrace of love, obligation, guilt and resentment that feels as unrelenting as the weather.
Steve Kline, a functional cocaine addict and alcoholic, lonely after his wife of nine years, the love of his life, if he is even capable of love, leaves him, sleeps with his best friend Dan’s wife, Janet. He is also Janet’s coke supplier. Although Steve feels guilty, he is jealous of the long marriage maintained by his closest friends.
“She kissed him, and Steve could still taste the sex on her tongue. He hoped she planned to shower before Dan came home, but part of him, deep inside, also hoped that she didn’t.”
Enter Jackie, the functioning alcoholic, sometimes cocaine abuser, writer who has, while drunk, hit Steve, her neighbor, bartender, and supplier, with her car; as he is running crazily across the street, to escape detection by Dan who has arrived home early. She fails to stop as Steve continues to race up to his own porch. Jackie, a Stephen King admiring writer, is somewhat of a stand-in for Rebecca Rowland who, much like King, writes her character chapters changing her close third person voice adroitly.
Jackie is as lonely, though not as reclusive, as John. She has renamed the cat Jonesy, Jimmy Changa.
“This was how the crazy cat lady stereotype must have come to be, “ she thought. “Lonely, middle-aged women talking to their pets like human companions.”
There is Kim Odell, a desperate old fashioned trad wife and mother who rigidly controls her appearance and daily schedule with a neurotic discipline. Her desire to please her husband, Tom, is challenged when he suggests they attend a sex club, an idea that is abhorrent to her.
“The very thought of it, of the layers and layers of filth and grime coating the seats and carpet, made her nauseated, but she forced a smile to peek around the edges of her mouth.”
Terrified her husband will replace her with a better model, she is unable to say no to him.
Visibility is low as foot upon foot of snow hushes the neighborhood, sequestering its hapless residents indoors save for bouts of shoveling and an occasionally wandering Rose who signs creepy, cryptic messages to her daughter Carol. Other residents hear sounds they can’t identify as the wind blasts the town in its icy fury. For anyone who has ever ventured out walking in blizzard conditions and almost gotten lost, the former world unrecognizable, it is the perfect horrifying predicament.
What is most enjoyable is how the pacing of the novel mirrors the actual pacing of a blizzard. It starts with preparations, slow buildup, fury of falling snow, lulls in the storm — represented perhaps by the tantalizingly creepy interludes of an autopsy report, news articles of past snowstorm anomalies, and even a children’s show gone wrong in a bloody fashion — and finally the last falling flakes, desultorily drifting through the air.
As the storm abates and Windy Weather warns of rising temperatures and floods to come, we wonder what has become of the residents of a street in a small suburban neighborhood of Hampden Massachusetts.
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