It's also one of the author's personal favorites (click here to read his thoughts on it). It was really the first book where everything worked from the get-go. No major revisions, no huge editing hiccups, a title that absolutely everyone agreed on from the first page. Everything worked.

None of that matters, because of The Mistake.

Sherlock Holmes has Irene Adler, who he respects enough such that he only refers to her as The Woman. Similarly, this is The Mistake. An error so large that it looms like a giant looming thing [3] over any triumphs the book might have.

Compounding it is the fact that it's a small mistake — literally just a single digit in a number — but it's on the first page of the book, and it makes the author look like an idiot. It might not even be his fault — I don't know for sure — but it's still probably the single worst mistake in any of the books. Or at least the most obvious.

In the opening scene, the bad guy, the Iceman, is on a snowmobile driving across a frozen lake. It's late night, and visibility is poor. He's driving almost entirely by his compass and familiarity with the area. Due west across the lake, 370 degrees on the compass.

There are, of course, only 360 degrees on a compass. Due west is 270 degrees. A simple mistake: someone put in a 3 where a 2 should have been. Maybe it was the author's fault, or perhaps it was someone at the publishing end of things [4]. Either way, the error was right there, front and center, on the very first page of the book. 370 degrees. Due west.

But a lot of fans were so convinced that the author didn't know that there are only 360 degrees on a compass that I received a lot of fan mail about it. Mail deriding the author's intelligence, or questioning his experience in the real world. And since this was before email became as ubiquitous as it is today, most of these complaints were hand-written, on regular paper, sent via the United States Postal Service. That's about as hardcore as you can get without actually stalking an author in real life [5].

So the author called his editor, and complained. And while it was too late to get it for the hardcover — that was already out, remember — they had plenty of time to get it for the paperback. They'd change the 370 degrees thing, Neil said [6].

So it was changed.

But it was not fixed.

When the paperback came out, right there, on the first page, the Iceman is on his snowmobile driving blind across a frozen lake, going by his compass reading. Due west. 37 degrees.

Rather than actually correct the mistake and change 370 to 270, they just lopped off the 0. And while 37 degrees is at least a real direction, it's still wrong. It's a bit more north of northeast, so it's pretty damn wrong [7].

This error was never corrected for subsequent paperbacks — it costs a lot of money to make new printing plates for books [8], and it's simply not cost-effective to replace it until the printing press wear out. Not for a single-letter typo, anyway. So they let it slide. And slide. And slide.

When the book was remastered and reissued with the all-new introduction by the author, the error was finally, finally corrected. The new paperbacks have the Iceman heading due west, 270 degrees, and all is well again.

The original book came out in 1993. The corrected paperbacks weren't released until 2009. That's sixteen years to correct a tiny, simple, stupid error, that just happened to be on the first page of what many fans believe to be the best of the Prey books.

And that's all I have to say about that [9].

The next iteration of the character was Mister Blue, so called because his blue eyes were the only thing visible under his ski mask in the first chapter. That one was around for a long time, right up until the end. In fact, the first paperback version of Silent Prey had a teaser for Winter Prey in it, and he was still called Mister Blue in that teaser [10].

Eventually the author changed it to The Iceman and that was the one that stuck. The change doesn't affect the story, but it's relevant to what happened for the UK release.

Unless you're in the United Kingdom, that is [12].

The Prey books never really took off in the UK the way a lot of other series by American authors did, and nobody really knows why. Maybe it's the way the rights have been passed from publisher to publisher [13]. Maybe it's the delay between the US publication and the UK publication, even though there aren't real translation issues. Maybe it's some kind of legal thing involving the Berne convention. Or maybe it's that there's someone insane working for the publisher who is actively sabotaging things.

Seriously, when you've got a series that has strong branding, you've got to be either evil or malicious to change it without a damn good reason [14]. And yet, when Winter Prey came out in the UK, it was titled The Iceman. Not a bad name in and of itself, but wrong nevertheless. And, again, there was no reason for them to do so. The four previous books all had been released in the UK with the Prey title intact. They were just then reissuing them all with snazzy new covers and good production values [15]. Why change the title? Why change it to something that has nothing to do with the other titles in the series? Why, why why?

I have no good answers for that. I have no answers at all. It's just another inexplicable thing that happened. Maybe it really was malicious intent, and the author has a nemesis [16]. That at least would give things a reason. As it is, it's just... there.

One idea that popped out was a group of near-feral kids — teens and pre-teens — living off the land, surviving by scavenging off farms and homesteads. Runaways and other lost types, they were always at the fringes of society. Not many people knew they were out there, but when they finally (accidentally, perhaps) kill someone, the police start chasing them.

Combine that with the legend of the Wendigo — a monster, formerly human, that's known for cannibalism [17] — and you have the kernel for a strange, haunting story. More something Stephen King would write than John Sandford. Children of the Corn, but in the snow.

But the author rejected this plot fairly early as being too improbable, too crazy. Sure, he had psychos in the books, but at least they followed the rules of society [18], and were sort of normal in their work-a-day lives. These kids would be something completely different, and not something that would fit well into a Prey book.

Some elements still carried over: that the sex ring had a lot of kids involved became a key point. Their hideout in a disused barn was used by John Mail in Mind Prey. And even though it's been more than twenty years since the author abandoned this idea, I don't think he ever fully gave up on the core concept: there's something I find oddly familiar about the situation in Gathering Prey, something that reminds me of this long-ago plotline...