Snowblind Books in Order

The Snowblind series takes Michael McBride's wilderness horror into the Colorado Rockies, where snow, distance, and bad weather can be as lethal as whatever is moving beyond the tree line. These are survival stories with a creature-feature edge. The people in them are already isolated before they realize they are being hunted.

In Snowblind, four old college friends head into the mountains for their annual elk hunt. It is meant to be a familiar trip, though the years and old tensions have changed the group. Elsewhere, a stranger emerges from a blizzard carrying a horrifying warning. Soon the hunters learn that the wilderness has other hunters in it.

The storm closes in.

The first book uses the mountains as a trap. Visibility disappears, cold drains strength, and getting help is not simple. McBride builds the tension through the sense that the characters do not understand the territory as well as they thought they did. The threat has been in those woods for a long time, and it has survived by staying hidden.

The Killing Grounds shifts to a new search in an even more remote part of the Rockies. John Avery has spent years looking for signs of a girlfriend who vanished during a ski trip. When a video camera offers a possible clue, Sheriff Wayne Dayton sends a team into the backcountry to learn what happened. A freak blizzard turns that search into another desperate fight for survival.

Both books are lean, cold-weather horror. They have missing-person mysteries, search parties, brutal landscapes, and predators that make darkness feel like a tactical advantage. The series is especially interested in what happens when capable people enter unfamiliar country believing preparation will be enough.

There is no easy way out once the weather turns.

Start with Snowblind. It establishes the series' approach to mountain isolation and its hidden menace. The Killing Grounds follows with a separate central group and mystery, but it works best after the first book because it returns to the same dangerous world and builds on its atmosphere.