A review by swivelhead
The Black Snow by Paul Lynch

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

The Black Snow is the bleak tale of Barnabas Kane, a stubborn man who is willing to risk everything to overcome a tragic event rather than suffer a modicum of embarrassment. He learns what it means to be part of a community, and how negative the effects can be when one acts against the norms and traditions of said community. Much of the conflict of the novel comes from the friction of him feeling like a "local stranger" to his neighbors and struggling to receive help from them. This leads him down an obsessive, almost paranoid rabbit hole and his entire life begins to fall apart. I had a hard time putting the book down in the last third, when everything starts rapidly snowballing and unraveling.

I'm a big fan of Lynch's writing style in this; it takes a pastoral novel set in the countryside with a hyper-literary style and imbues it with a rough strangeness that gives the proceedings a lot of texture and character. He does a good job describing the landscape in ways which seem to reflect the individuals living in them, equally savage and tender.