A Winter Haunting

A Winter Haunting is a horror novel by the American writer Dan Simmons, published in 2002.

Dale Stewart is a former college professor and novelist whose career and marriage have both come apart through his own actions, and he returns to Elm Haven, the small Illinois town where he grew up, in the last hours of Halloween. What he wants is to be alone, and he takes a long-deserted farmhouse on the far outskirts of the dying town, which was once the home of a strange and brilliant friend of his who lost his life in a grisly accident during the summer of 1960. The move is the latest in a series of recent mistakes, and it does not give him the isolation he was looking for, because he has not come to the house alone: the private demons he has been carrying arrive with him and begin to twist his sense of what is real into frightening new shapes. A heavy early snow begins to fall over the town as the novel gets under way.

The book is a haunted-house story in which the haunting and the protagonist's own history are difficult to separate, and it is set in the same Illinois town as some of Simmons's other fiction.