3.0
Frozen Hell
ByPublisher Description
FROZEN HELL is the original version of John W. Campbell's classic novella, Who Goes There? (filmed as The Thing). Recently discovered among Campbell's papers, this version adds another 45 pages to the story. Includes a Preface by Alec Nevala-Lee and an Introduction by Robert Silverberg.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesFrozen Hell Reviews
3.0
“That was fun, but I'm very sure that's not how frozen fish work 🤣”
“I love the movie The Thing - it's an undeniable classic. The prequel was also nicely done.
This story is quite interesting in its own way, reading it was like watching another variation of the movie. It's written in a sort of naive manner here and there, but it contains a lot of interesting ideas about that alien species. It was an okay read.”
“What a complicated situation I’ve found myself in. First off, I love both The Thing movies. The setting fit the narrative so perfectly that once I found out they were based off of a novela and that that thing was named Frozen Hell, I wanted to instantly dive in. I was excited to feel the Thing realized in a long-form narrative, where tension can build in a way that maybe wouldn’t even fit the movie. To borrow a quote from another favorite of mine “We were so wrong.”
Much to my dismay, the book is soaked in jargon from an unknown past in an unknown place in Antarctica. This wouldn’t be as much a problem if I had more time to read and Bing, like, everything on the page for, like, the entire book, and I did try to research most of everything I didn’t understand early on, but at a certain point, I needed to keep up a pace that would allow me to finish this relative short story in about two weeks. I say this all to say, I trudged on through this story misunderstanding dialogue, places, and things, which prevented me from forming a cohesive picture of what I was reading.
I shouldn’t fault the book for this, and I’m mostly not doing that. My rating is stands only under the circumstance in which I read this book. I’d love to go back and reread (or understand) this book for the first time. Having said that, I continued on reading, believing that once I reached the Thing, certain mechanisms would fall into place, and although I would have some misunderstanding of the story, the action involving the monster itself would grip me. That really didn’t happen.
I can like an underwhelming story and conclusion. I don’t always need a big-budget, action-packed showcase, but I do need more tension to build before that point. When the story first starts, the blizzard is set up in a way that made me think it would play an integral role in the plot. To an extent, it forms the static rules that the Thing and people adhere to, but there’s never a culmination of action and blizzard that builds the suspense, terror, dread. Instead, the Thing reads as a convict trying to escape prison with some natural abilities at their disposal, when I was really hoping for a brutal environment that was as much hell for people as it was the Thing.
In all, I do look forward to revisiting this book again. Maybe I will appreciate the clarity that brings and attach to the book in a different perspective.”
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