A Review of Tyrell Johnson’s “The Wolves of Winter”
Hunger Station
Having your first book published in the first week of January is not a good sign. Yes, there’s less competition among other books coming out that week, but most people’s Visa cards have been maxed out from buying for family at Christmas and indulging for themselves on Boxing Day. This is the precarious situation that Tyrell Johnson, an American who now lives in Canada, faces. His debut book, The Wolves of Winter, is being dropped at that time, so I admittedly had to wonder if the book was terrible. After all, why would the publisher be dropping it into this dead zone, sales-wise?
It turns out, The Wolves of Winter isn’t too bad — as far as page-turners go. The publisher is marketing the book as a cross between Station Eleven and The Hunger Games. The comparison is apt because Johnson borrows some imagery (and the general plot setup) from Station Eleven, and the heroine — a young woman who is killer when wielding a cross-bow — is basically a copy and paste of Katniss Everdeen. So what the book about?
In a post-terrorism, post-flu epidemic world, a young girl named Gwendolyn (but who prefers to be called Lynn) and her family make do trying to survive in the wilds of the Yukon during winter, after having emigrated from Alaska when the flu started catching fire. The flu doesn’t like cold weather, and Canada is safer than Alaska in that regard (believe it or not), so the characters are ex-patriots. Anyhow, everything is fine and dandy until Lynn runs into a fugitive named Jax during one of her hunts, and it turns out that Jax has superhuman capabilities and is, thus, being tailed out an outfit that goes by the short name Immunity, which is trying to find a cure for the flu. Basically, the shit hits the fan when Jax comes into the picture, and Immunity catches up with him. This puts Lynn’s family in a perilous situation where they must fight even harder to stay alive.
That’s basically the plot outline of The Wolves of Winter. It’s not highly original in a sense, but the book does its job of keeping the pages flipping — until Immunity comes onto the scene. I don’t want to spoil anything, but Immunity as a group are cardboard villains, the kind of bad guys who live to talk a lot about their motivations in monologues, thus giving the good guys more time to escape. Basically, the book starts getting sillier and sillier about halfway through, which is too bad because, up until then, it’s a fairly effective thriller. It’s not something that’s going to make you forget Station Eleven or The Hunger Games, but, for the first half, the book tells a compelling story. The quaintness of setting a human survival story in the Yukon is mostly the cause of that.
Johnson, probably knowing that he’s writing a pulpy knock-off, tries to go deep with symbolism to make his yarn stand out. Not only do we have the character of Jax to contend with, but our heroes start running into all-white wildlife: white crows, white foxes, white everything. I don’t know if that’s meant to be a commentary on the Trump-like world we know live in where anything that is a different colour of skin is meant to be “weird” at the least and a threat at the most, and so we’re moving towards an all-white society out of Nazi Germany. I found this element of the novel a bit baffling because it really adds nothing to the plot. But maybe this gets explained in the sequel, for the book ends on something of a cliff-hanger (suggesting a sequel is indeed on the way).
If you’re going to read The Wolves of Winter, my advice would be to brace yourself to read something you’ve already read and loved. You will be caught up in the uniqueness of the setting, but, eventually, the dialogue becomes more and more stilted and the characters become caricatures. It’s as though Johnson rushed through the second and third acts of the book. Again, it’s a bit of a shame because the start of the novel is interesting and compelling, and keeps you reading to find out what’s going to happen next. In that sense, The Wolves of Winter is successful in the smallness of places: surveying the scene of a dystopian Yukon is breathtaking. But when the bullets and arrows start flying, the novel becomes a bit clichéd.
Really, though, you’re getting two books in one here. The survival part of the story is ripped right from the pages of The Hunger Games. The flu epidemic portion comes from Station Eleven. To that end, I’d say that The Wolves of Winter is really meant for older teenagers who have read both prior novels, and liked them enough that they wouldn’t mind reading a merger of the two. To that end, the publisher is right in their marketing of this book. But are they really marketing it at all by publishing when they’re publishing it?
On that note, an early January release date is not the end of the world (no pun intended) for a book that’s set in the snowy confines of a Yukon winter. If you want to read something as frosty as what’s covering the glass of your windows, this book is perfect for that kind of feeling. While the novel does, ultimately, come up a bit short after a certain point of no return is reached, it is still enjoyable and pleasant. The Wolves of Winter is just an agreeable time-killer, nothing more and nothing less. If you’re looking for something that’s not much of a challenge to read, and like things kept simple, this book is recommended. If not, there’s always a certain young adult trilogy and a book called Station Eleven to re-read to make you feel like you are part of a world that we may be on the verge of heading towards, with much more to say about the times we now live in than The Wolves of Winter ever aspires to, alas.
Tyrell Johnson’s The Wolves of Winter will be published by Simon and Schuster Canada on January 2, 2018.
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