I did a little digging before writing this blog, and I came across Ronald Malfi’s explanation for how the story started:
I began to think of a story. What if my flight had been canceled and I had actually decided to rent a car and drive the five hours from Chicago to Iowa in this storm? The blinding snow, the impassable roads…anything could have happened to me.
And what about other things? Darker things? I spent that evening in my hotel room, nursing a cup of coffee and staring out the window at the storm. There was no moon; a single lamppost across the snow-covered highway was the only source of light. I watched the tornados of snow ride through the freezing wind and…I swear it…several times I thought I glimpsed shapes out there. Living, moving shapes. Hungry shapes.
There was a notepad with the hotel’s crest at the top of the page in one of the desk drawers. I dug a pen out of my carry-on and, finishing my coffee, began to write…
The aliens in this story that are snow were quite original in concept. Malfi rode the shoulders of other writers such as Heinlein with the Puppet Masters in some respects, and the monsters reminded me a little of the Thing, but at least they were recognizable when they’d taken over a human body. While I don’t mind not knowing how a creature works exactly, or where it comes from completely, I do need a bit of motivation.
The Xenomorph sort of escapes this, because it’s much more of an animal intelligence than the snow creatures were. It’s just following the instincts that it has. The snow monsters were obviously malevolent, but I wanted that malevolence to have more of a direction, and I didn’t get much on that front. I’m intrigued by the idea of this just being a scouting party, but then why announce their presence so much by cutting off the towns like that? Better to isolate a group of travelers and overcome them to learn what they needed to know.
The characters might not have known what they were about, but they could have discovered some things about the creatures along the way. I liked what details were revealed about the snow creatures, but I wanted a bit more detail. It seems that Malfi might be planning a sequel, and that’s why we didn’t get a large amount of motivational details. The snow aliens are a bit like the Widows from Breeding Ground, except I liked the creatures because what we did learn about them was interesting and put together in a terrifying way.
Oddly, the Lovecraftian ideal of nameless horrors descending upon humanity without reason didn’t work for me here. I think it had to do with the fact that the aliens were so well drawn in almost every other aspect that their lack of motivation stuck out to me a lot. That would’ve added the extra dimension to put them above monsters like the Widows, who had every reason to destroy humanity and yet sat passively by outside the fences. I much rather would have seen “Phase Two” whatever that was, start right away rather than the aliens just disappear back into the funnel cloud-thing and leaving the reader with an sort-of finish.
