Loved this one.
It occured to me while listening that winter nightscapes are quite potent in many mediums: "The Thing" would have been half the movie it was were it not for its setting. Ditto "The Shining". I would have thought that only in visual forms -film, photo, etc- would it be so effective, but I found the imagery of the dark howling night over a white plain (plane, heheh get it? puns) within the story quite effective.
There is a great irony to this sort of setting, both figuratively and literally, wherein when the world has actually been rendered black-and-white, that things become most distorted. When it's like this, shadows turn into living things, living things into shadows:
I have a friend who claimed that, when he was a guard at an Alaskan Air Force base, was patrolling in a blizzard. He thought he saw the shape of a bear lumbering toward him in the snow. He aimed his rifle at it, but it didn't seem to get any closer. He backed away, keeping his eyes on it. When he came back the next day he realized he'd been aiming at an external propane tank for a residence. He had a story about someone else who mowed down a line of christmas trees (still growing, undecorated) with his carbine because they looked like a row of people coming at him through a blizzard.
I live in woodsy New England (quite near where Lovecraft wrote a lot of his stuff, he often references towns I have stayed in or near) so perhaps the effectiveness of this setting for me is merely sense-memory. I'm curious, do people who aren't familiar with such weather find it as compelling? I know we have some Aussies and west-coasters here (and others besides) so I'm putting the question out.
