The Abominable

Wow. I love mountaineering books, especially about Mt. Everest, and this is a great one. Add a high altitude thriller plot line in the last quarter of the book, and this is a banger. Don't be confused. Dan Simmons is known for horror, but this book is not horror. It was not at all what I expected - it was so much more. If you love high altitude adventures, you'll enjoy this book.

Dan Simmons is so hit or miss for me. This was a big, fat, overlong miss. And be forewarned that there is no real horror or even thriller in this lengthy tome. If you enjoy overly technical exposition on how to climb mountains and what gear to wear and bring, you may enjoy this more than I did. But not only could this volume have been about 3/4 slimmer (Simmons doesn't even get to the meat of the story until nearly 500 pages in!!), but it needed a much heavier-handed editor as well. Many, many, MANY sentences are repeated verbatim not just once or twice throughout the book, but half a dozen times or more. And when we finally learn of the abomination the book is so named for, it is such a ridiculous “twist” on historical events that it'd be laugh-out-loud funny if it wasn't such a tired trope. I mean, really, the bad guys are Nazis? How inventive. If I had known that's the kind of payoff I'd get for sticking with this, I would've stopped reading 100 pages in like I was sorely tempted to do.