Winter Dark
Audible's Thriller of the Year 2019
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Winter Dark
Narrated by:
Ell Potter
Buy Now for £15.99
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Narrated by:
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Ell Potter
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By:
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Alex Callister
About this listen
When you buy murder online, who is there to stop you?
GCHQ agent Winter has just 14 days to bring down the website of a formidable criminal organisation before a teenager is tortured to death in front of an online audience of millions. Going deep under cover disguised as the paid assassin Snow White, Winter must infiltrate the inner circle of the extraordinarily powerful man at the heart of the dark web. This is a gripping, fast-paced ride through a disturbingly plausible technological future in which Callister’s protagonist must battle to bring down the terrifying crimes tearing through society.
About Winter
Master hacker, highly intelligent, combat trained: Winter is a very modern spy. Worlds apart from the straitlaced characters created in the minds of Ian Fleming and John le Carré , Alex Callister's lead protagonist wouldn't dream of playing the part of the impeccable agent. However, despite her intimidating skillset, Winter is delightfully human and often prone to prioritizing her libido over her employer. Undeniably sexy and exceptionally accomplished, Winter is a true 21st-century heroine.
About the Author
Alex Callister is the pseudonym of an industry expert on media, telecoms and internet stocks. She studied history at Oxford and the British School at Rome and was set for a career in academia until the beginning of the tech boom woke a lifelong interest in internet shares. Alex has spent her career visiting high security web hosting sites and speculating on what might go wrong. Winter Dark is her debut novel and the first in the Winter series.
Please note: This audiobook contains graphic adult content.
©2019 Alex Callister (P)2019 Audible, LtdAbout Winter
Master hacker, highly intelligent, combat trained: Winter is a very modern spy. Worlds apart from the straitlaced characters created in the minds of Ian Fleming and John le Carré , Alex Callister's lead protagonist wouldn't dream of playing the part of the impeccable agent. However, despite her intimidating skillset, Winter is delightfully human and often prone to prioritizing her libido over her employer. Undeniably sexy and exceptionally accomplished, Winter is a true 21st-century heroine.A thrilling performance from rising star Ell Potter
- Winter Dark
- Introducing the Slashstorm website
- Winter Dark
- Winter goes Russian
- Winter Dark
- Meeting the Marquise (explicit)
- Winter Dark
- Winter gets into the ring
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A note to our listeners
She's terrifyingly quick-witted and intimidatingly sexy with a superhuman skillset: Winter is a woman to be reckoned with. Everyone on the Audible team was immediately drawn to Winter, and we didn’t hesitate in naming this our Thriller of the Year 2019. Alex Callister has perfectly captured today's mood, so cast aside all your current preconceptions of traditional spy novels because Winter Dark puts you right in the middle of a terrifying near-future world plagued by perverse online crime.Ahead of the audiobook's release on 21st March, we put some of our thoughts on film.
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About the Narrator
Ell Potter is in her final year at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). She has appeared in the school’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, playing Helena, and New England, playing Alice Berry. She is also a writer and comedian, and in 2018 took her two-woman show HOTTER to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it enjoyed a sellout run and was named an Evening Standard Best New Writing of 2018. It has since secured a transfer to the prestigious Soho Theatre. She has been entered for the 2019 Carleton Hobbs BBC radio drama competition. Ell has devoured audiobooks for as long as she can remember, growing up on Harry Potter and His Dark Materials during long car journeys. Winter Dark is her first audiobook.
Meet the author of Winter Dark
Alex Callister is the pseudonym of an industry expert on media, telecoms and internet stocks. She studied history at Oxford and the British School at Rome and was set for a career in academia until the beginning of the tech boom woke a lifelong interest in internet shares. Alex has spent her career visiting high security web hosting sites and speculating on what might go wrong. Winter Dark is her debut novel and the first in the Winter series.
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There are already scores of reviews of this debut novel drawing attention to the book’s striking outward characteristics, and beyond doubt there will be many more: its pace, its sexiness, its gripping contemporary plot set in a slightly dystopian but easily realisable future, its clever culling of thriller elements old and new (‘Killing Eve’, Lizbeth Salander, James Bond, et al.) its glossy sheen of all-round kick-assiness—it is redundant to elaborate on such a litany here, especially as there are certainly many reviewers better qualified to do so than I. Take all these as a given. Instead, I want to draw the reflective reader’s attention to the book’s hidden qualities which seem to me to be impressive, for, like the very different thrillers of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and John le Carré, this is a book that conceals more than it reveals.
The eponymous heroine Winter—whose first name we do not and must not ever know—shares certain mythical qualities with the greatest adventurer of them all, Odysseus: both are endlessly resourceful and full of lies and tricks, both engage with monsters and are over-confident and are alluring to women, each is capable of huge violence, and both are on a journey—though only Odysseus knows that he wants to go home. Winter has no Ithaca and her rootlessness, the result of psychic damage as a child, is the engine of her soul. There is a lot of physical screaming and crying aloud in this book, but none carries more unmistakably than the unvoiced crying of a frightened little girl as she shivers under a blanket in an unspeakable Russian orphanage, trying to get through the night. With one necessary exception, Winter is very good at keeping this little girl from the purview of those whom she engages with, but she does not deceive us, and neither should she; we must perceive her as through a glass darkly, for the child locked in the lumber-room of her heart points to the one little patch of humanity on which Winter makes her stand.
It is odd that no reviewer at the time of writing has pointed to the emotional core of the book, which carries a strong resonance of John Fowles’ ‘The Magus’, for Winter’s captivity on the island and her duel for subjection and dominance that plays out with her own Prince of Darkness is a fine example of a creative reworking of influence. Let no one think there is an implied criticism here, for what is Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ but a massively, superbly reworked ‘Jane Eyre’? Be that as it may, the placing of this long episode of Winter’s island captivity is the first (and I would argue, the best) of the book’s two climaxes, with the background presence of the sea framing both: the first here on the island, the second inside a sea-bound freight container. It is a tribute to Callister’s assured sense of architecture that she does not place this earlier, quieter, yet most powerful interaction at the end of the book, as the unwritten rule of thrillers and commercial fiction demands; she dutifully gets around this by offering a very sexual ‘climax’ of submission that will satisfy nearly everyone. Nor is this all: reader/listeners interested in unearthing other reworked influences will revisit with profit Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ which, despite the lack of a piano tuner or mother figure, finds many playful resonances and echoes in Callister’s novel.
This is not a book for the undemanding reader who likes every dangler snipped and tied as the story comes to its end; because of the personae, the masks Winter assumes, her biography remains misty and uncertain, forcing us back on our own efforts to fill in the gaps. How exactly did a frightened abandoned child evolve into an anti-social teenager of extraordinary technical and physical capabilities? Note also that this is a book disturbingly devoid of father-figures; the child—Snow White—Winter— Bluebeard’s victim—the lover and destroyer of the Prince of Darkness—in all her incarnations no paternal image is sought or seemingly required. Fertile ground indeed for future developments, and which cry out to be explored.
To reduce the focus to the sexual side of the book is inevitable, given that it carries such a distinct erotic charge throughout, but from the many reviews this seems to have divided reader/listeners sharply. Sexual activity is famously difficult to describe in a way that doesn’t make one want to laugh, snort or cry—even the greatest authors fall at this hurdle, either aiming too low or too high at the bar—so I shall only say this: Winter exhibits a vulpine sexuality as she careens through the trajectory plotted for her, but she is often most sexually interesting when she responds suddenly rather than after consideration. The backward-glancing appreciation she shows a pretty maid in Paris, for example—an appreciation never to be consummated—is much more effective than the full kit and caboodle offered in the final scene with her Prince of Darkness. Her non-discriminatory omnisexual nature—young women, teenage boys, dirty punters in a brothel, the Prince of Darkness that she should never have had sex with—are all grist to her omnivorous mill, but it is not what is important about her. What matters are her twin sides, the Odyssean and the abandoned little girl, both who compete within her for something that remains forever out of reach and for which her sexual appetite provides the only compensation. A poor one, we might suspect.
If my reading of Winter is correct, it will be obvious why the attempt to film her (especially in standard glossy Hollywood format) will require a heightened degree of sensitivity if the contrapuntal nature of the narrative is to be preserved. If all that the camera and adapted script picks up are sleek tanned bodies, impressively explosive hardware and incrementally jaw-dropping special effects, then this will reduce the whole to just another turbo-charged super-hero thriller, like an extraordinarily tasty pizza for a Saturday night, forgotten as soon as the packaging is cast into the bin. What Winter requires to bring her into the light of the imagination is the filmic equivalent of Ell Potter’s wonderful voice whispering in one’s ear. ‘Winter Dark’ succeeds in a way that other novels of its kind do not quite manage to do because their larger-than-life heroes eat up the whole world, leaving nothing over to blossom in the spring. But as Shelley wrote, ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ Everyone knows this famous line of course, and it might seem like a cheap poetic shot; but it is not, because in the same poem there is a couplet that reminds of Winter’s Janus face:
‘Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!’
We are left to ask, which will she be?
IF WINTER COMES...
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