Greg F. Gifune – A Winter Sleep

In a haunted hotel on the outskirts of a forgotten town, a bizarre group of tenants guard a hor­rible secret. A troubled man on the run, with nothing left to lose, drives aimlessly along dark highways in search of redemption. A little boy, brutally at­tacked and left for dead, realizes the strange power his agony has granted him.

An enigmatic home­ less man with night­mares he can no longer control, lost in a violent dream­scape only he under­stands, watches and waits. As a snowstorm traps them all within the walls of the old hotel, where madness and depravity run wild, from the shad­ows, a new reign of lesser gods begins, and an aberrant evil fights for survival amidst the cold ter­ror of a desolate winter, and the bloody dreams of the hopeless and the damned.

They exist. Not many, I don’t wanna say that; but they do exist.
These authors, who are able to literally tear the heart out of the reader’s chest.
These authors, who mercilessly throw the reader into the rugged gorges of depression and never let him miss an instant of this endless falling.
These authors, who are able to cut every word in the mind of the helpless reader and blind their eyes with the most horrible images.

Greg F. Gifune?
No, Gifune isn’t one of these…

…Gifune is worse.

A man who flees from his past, a hotel in the oblivion of time and a secret that has survived eternity already – the stuff of which nightmares are.
But Gifune doesn’t call ’em – he neither creates nor does he recreates them; he reminds for them.
He himself is the nightmare, that calmly recalls yesterday – reposefully reminds for this one moment that has risen from its own to this one irrevocable fate.

Out of the primal escape from the past, grows the escape from the future – from what will inevitably come; becomes the escape into the past – into this "shall", into this "must", into the "will"; …her arms.

Not a created tear of drama, not a staged tear of theatrics – a, this one tear of being.
No ripping, no gnawing, no screaming, no cutting. The constant moment, the eternal moment, the now, which carries the yesterday in it and knows the morning already for a long time.

A Winter Sleep is a love story, a confession, a journey on every path, which’s not created for, but from us.
So initially I read through the eyes of the protagonist (first-person) – soon I’ll realize, that I’m not reading, but being read!
The book seems to read me, seems to react, seems to create itself as a consequence just in this moment. And so I do not read – I live. I live the personal moment, stare in the pages like a mirror and I’m carried by the tear into the past, until it bursts, as a never ending truth, on the floor.

But it wouldn’t be Gifune, if there wouldn’t be this last prick, the unspeakable, which now forms the end – no! – it is the beginning, it is this "again"; instead of infinity, eternal finitude…

And now it’s time to sleep – winter’s coming.