The Winter Men
by Brit Griffin
Brit Griffin's The Winter Men is a near-future, climate-changed western, with snowmachines riding into town and a showdown in the snow. Welcome to the Northern!
Brit Griffin, as publisher of Highgrader Magazine for ten years, wasn't afraid to mix the diesel with the fertilizer. The tradition continues in her first novel.
Johnny Slaught and his Algonquin buddy Chumboy Commando didn't set out to lead one of the most notorious bands of rebels in recent history. But after the world descended into climate change chaos, the government did some serious triage, forcing wide-scale evacuations and abandoning rural areas to the non-stop snow.
Soon enough, Slaught was forced by circumstance to stand up to the muscle of TALOS Security Corporation, setting in motion a rebellion of average folks fighting to rebuild their lives in the abandoned snow-scape of the northland. Can a mixture of scrap snowmachines, gasoline, and the military wisdom of Subcommander Marcos be enough to let them rebuild their lives?
Brit Griffin co-authored a non-fiction history (We Lived a Life and Then Some: The Life, Death and Life of a Mining Town, (Between the Lines, 1996) that was listed as a must-read on the 2011 CBC Cross-Country Check-up Summer Reading list. For ten years she ran an independent magazine (Highgrader Magazine) on rural and resource-based communities. She received two American Catholic press awards for her writing on family life, and has worked as a freelancer in print, video, and radio. Griffin currently works for Timiskaming First Nation, an Algonquin community in northern Quebec. She lives in Cobalt with her husband, and is the mother of three daughters.
Praise for The Winter Men:
A taut thriller set in a post-apocalyptic Northern Ontario darkened by permanent winter. Enjoy the chills!
Hal Niedzviecki.
Brit Griffin's The Winter Men is crazy fun...terrific hard boiled flow to the prose and solid northern elements added to a classic genre. Griffin's got it pitch perfect.
Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool Changes Everything
A contemporary and incisive story skewering life in today's north, as gritty and humorous as the people it portrays.
Louie Palu, documentary photographer
Sequel The Winter Men II, Into the Deep Dark now also available here.
ISBN: 978-1-896350-65-3 | WMPub#1166 | 5.½" x 8.½" | 303 pages, trade paperback | $19.95