Графический роман «Frostbite»: канадские авторы создают хоррор о снежных монстрах и последствиях жадности

Graphic novel Frostbite bares its fangs Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter. Some childhood trauma stays with you. “As a kid, when I was walking through the snow, you never knew when you’d go into a snowbank and your leg would get stuck,” recalls Vancouver-based writer Ian Boothby over video call. “One day I was doing that and my foot got stuck underneath a tree branch, but my friends thought there was a monster under the snow and screamed, and then ran away because they were terrified, leaving me to die. As a kid, that locked into my head: ‘What if there was somebody under the snow?’ ” Artist Pia Guerra remembers the same thing happening to her as an adult on Cypress Mountain: the snow shifting underfoot, and suddenly becoming trapped. “My foot went through a bunch of snow and got caught under a tree branch,” she adds on the same call. “I was like, ‘Well, this is ridiculous: I’m sitting here up to my hips in snow, and my foot is locked in, and I can’t wiggle out.’ ” The feeling of being trapped in snow, sitting prey for anything that might be hiding in the powder, is a clear inspiration for the pair’s new graphic novel, Frostbite. The creators are both beloved figures in comics—Guerra perhaps best known for Y: The Last Man, while Boothby was the lead writer for Simpsons Comics—and have co-written short stories or comics for everywhere from The New Yorker to MAD magazine. Conveniently, they’re also married, and the original idea for Frostbite emerged around 20 years ago on their honeymoon. Boothby was a fan of the Katherine Monk book Weird Sex & Snowshoes, about Canadian film, and had been kicking around the concept of a horror movie set on the roof of a cabin in the mountains. He pulled from the tension of Jaws, the well-defined monsters of Tremors, and that childhood fear of what lurked below the snow. A couple of attempts at making a movie didn’t go anywhere, but the idea was always on the back burner. A family interest in horror helped to reignite it. “When our niece got to be around 13, her mom was telling us about how her friends just come over and they watch scary movies and scream in the living room,” Guerra says fondly. “I think the story’s for her.” The pair reworked the story into a teen-appropriate thriller, keeping some elements (the cabin in the snow, the monsters, a climactic third act) while adding others (such as the daredevil influencer protagonists, whom readers meet jumping out of a helicopter to snowboard down a mountain). The book, which launched on August 4 across North America, is set in a deliberately vague location: somewhere near the Taku River, on the border between B.C. and Alaska. (Early on, there’s an editor’s note explaining “tourtierre” for non-Canadian readers.) But despite the nebulous place, there’s a distinctly Canadian bent to the story—and not just because the first victims we meet are a school bus full of young hockey players. “So much of the Canadian character is dealing with snow, and I think that makes it so different from the American character,” says Guerra, who grew up in New Jersey. “I think it affects how we interrelate with each other. Any country that deals with a lot of snow has to be kind to each other, to a degree: in order to get through this, we have to cooperate.” The story, for all its heart-pounding tension and dread, also touches on some deeper themes. Fellow protagonist Callum, who is from the region, tells a family story he heard of how the monsters might have come to be. There’s some disagreement, even within the text, of how the snow-dwelling creatures appeared. “The vampires aren’t like mystical creatures; they’re people who have been transformed by their own greed,” Guerra suggests. “They’re now constantly, always, perpetually thirsty, so that’s the consequence of how they lived their life.” While not explicitly stated due to the nebulous setting, Callum and his mother Marge are intended to be Indigenous. The monsters are written to be a regional phenomenon rather than part of a mythology though, with the family story giving an insight into colonial resource extraction. “Without making it too on the nose, we didn’t want to make anything about a magical culture or anything like that,” Boothby adds. “If you’re telling a Canadian story, you’ve got to make it diverse.” The real question, though, is whether their niece liked it. “She just read it for the very first time in full about two weeks ago and loved it,” Boothby says. “If you can just make one person scared, you’ve done your job, and we’ve made that one person scared and somewhat delighted.” Frostbite is out now through Scholastic, and will have a launch party on September 16 at Iron Dog Books.