The Snowman Cometh

No, not O’Neill’s Iceman or the Beatles’ Eggman goo goo b’joob but the Snowman: Peter Snow, a freelance writer and editor brought up in the North of England now based in Oxford. This new website showcases my recent short stories and ‘fantastic fictions’ as well as a selection of essays and poems.

The short stories drill down into a variety of lives and minds exploring their struggles to find meaning and connection and slip the bonds of constriction and self-delusion. The fantastic fictions explore the same themes while playing with ideas of time, chance and reality. The essays focus similarly on ambiguous or contrary aspects of some of my favourite writers, especially those in popular genres. 

Mostly set in the present day, the stories occasionally stretch back in time toto the forties and even to the classical world and – in one case – leap forward fifty years into the future. They range too in genres (interspersing novella-length pieces with much shorter flash fictions) and in tone – from the quizzical and satirical to the more deeply heart-felt and indeed tragic.

Linking them all is a sense of time lost and opportunities missed but sometimes recaptured. As such, they have particular resonance for my own generation, the Boomers, but I hope their appeal extends far more broadly. I remember the Beatles also sang:

I am he as you are me and we are all together

So here, out of my winter, I offer in these trying times some notes of hope and illumination.

Peter Snow