The Architecture of Snow (The David Morrell Short Fiction Collection #4) by David Morrell Page B

stake out my territory, I carried the package home. But I forgot about it until Sunday afternoon after I’d worked through several gut-busting boxes of submissions that included two serial-killer novels and a romantic saga about California’s wine country. The time-demanding tyranny of those manuscripts is one reason my wife moved out years earlier. She said she lived as if she were single, so she might as well be single. Most days, I don’t blame her.
    A Yankees game was on television. I opened a beer, noticed the package on a side table, and decided to flip though its contents during commercials. When I tore it open, I found a typed manuscript, double-spaced in professional format. With unsolicited manuscripts, you can’t count on any of that. It didn’t reek of cigarette smoke or food odors, and that too was encouraging. Still, I was troubled not to find an introductory letter and return postage.
    The manuscript didn’t have the uniform typeface that word processors and printers create. Some letters were faint, others dark. Some were slightly above or below others. The author had actually put this through a typewriter. It was a novel called The Architecture of Snow . An evocative title, I decided, although the marketing department would claim that bookstore clerks would mistakenly put it in the arts-and-architecture section. The writer’s name was Peter Thomas. Bland. The marketing department preferred last names that had easily remembered concrete nouns like “King”or “Steele.”
    With zero expectation, I started to read. Hardly any time seemed to pass before the baseball game ended. My beer glass was empty, but I didn’t remember drinking its contents. Surprised, I noticed the darkness outside my apartment’s windows. I glanced at my watch. Ten o’clock? Another fifty pages to go. Eager to proceed, I made a sandwich, opened another beer, shut off the TV, and finished one of the best novels I’d read in years.
    You dream about something like that. An absolutely perfect manuscript. Nothing to correct. Just a wonderful combination of hypnotic tone, powerful emotion, palpable vividness, beautiful sentences, and characters you never want to leave. The story was about a ten-year-old boy living alone with his divorced father on a farm in Vermont. In the middle of January, a blizzard hits the area. It knocks down electricity and telephone lines. It disables cell-phone relays. It blocks roads and imprisons the boy and his father.
     
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    “The father starts throwing up,” I told the marketing/editorial committee. “He gets a high fever. His lower right abdomen’s in terrific pain. There’s a medical book in the house, and it doesn’t take them long to realize the father has appendicitis. But they can’t telephone for help, and the father’s too sick to drive. Even if he could, his truck would never get through the massive drifts. Meanwhile, with the power off, their furnace doesn’t work. The temperature in the house drops to zero. When the boy isn’t trying to do something for his father, he works to keep a fire going in the living room, where they retreat. Plus, the animals in the barn need food. The cows need milking. The boy struggles through the storm to reach the barn and keep them alive. With the pipes frozen, he can’t get water from the well. He melts snow in pots near the fire. He heats canned soup for his dad, but the man’s too sick to keep it down. Finally, the boy hears a snowplow on a nearby road. In desperation, he dresses as warmly as he can. He fights through drifts to try to reach the road.”
    “So basically it’s a Young Adult book,” the head of marketing interrupted without enthusiasm. Young Adult is trade jargon for Juvenile.
    “A teenager might read it as an adventure, but an adult will see far more than that,” I explained. “The emotions carry a world of meaning.”
    “Does the boy save the father?” the new CEO asked. He came from Gladstone’s broadcast