Winter Spectre

Writer and university professor Dale Stewart, one of the main protagonists of Simmons's famous horror novel Summer of Night, returns to Elm Haven after several decades.

In the place where he spent his childhood, he now intends to draw inspiration for a book about all the adventures and terrifying things that happened to him and his friends in the seeming safety of this small American town.

Dale longs for just one thing – to finally find peace. And so, as the year draws to a close, during Halloween, he heads to the abandoned farm where his long-lost, brilliant friend Duane McBride used to live. He is haunted not only by inner demons, the bitter taste of a broken marriage, and a loss of enthusiasm, but also by the barking of the black dogs of melancholy and the gazes of mysterious figures from the local cemetery.

He enters the chilling house of the past, unsure if he will ever make it out again.

A Winter Haunting is not a direct sequel to Summer of Night; it is in dialogue with it, viewing its events through a new lens, but it can also be read as a standalone work, one of Simmons's finest, most mature novels, which just so happens to be considerably terrifying.