A Winter Haunting actually closes out the novels in their chronological order, but apparently offers up a different way of viewing Summer of Night by solely focusing on character Dale Stewart, who, 40 years down the line revisits his childhood home, but who has forgotten or misremembered the events of Summer of Night. A Winter Haunting allows readers to have a different view on the events of Summer of Night by its close.
But I confess I find this a mite bit problematic, since Dale Stewart isn't actually Summer of Night's sole main character, and there are other books that also tie into this universe.
As an experiment it's intriguing of course, but it's one that is slightly undercut by the existence of the other novels, specifically, Children of the Night, which follows one of the other main-est characters of Summer around as he deals with yet another supernatural threat, this time in a different country and some few years down the line.
Fires of Eden has this same character pop up again some few years further along and in a smaller role this time, and he is also out-staged by yet another character from Summer who has a more central role. This novel might not be supernatural, as is the next one; Darwin's blade, which is a more thriller-type of novel but which also has one of the central characters from Summer in a leading role.
Dan Simmons frowns on using the same characters over multiple books, but Summer of Night was such an autobiographical novel that some of these couldn't help but pop up again in other works.
As these aren't all horror novels, Seasons of Night and Fear are out for naming consideration, and I'd rather call these the Elm Haven universe novels, or just the Elm Haven series, despite the fact that only two of these, first and last, take place in Elm Haven.
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