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.

This book is about a team of climbers who are hired to go to Everest to find someone who was thought to have been lost on an expedition. On paper, I should have really liked this book, but it had quite a few shortcomings I could not overlook. 

I'll just touch on some builet points because I really do not have much to say about it. 

1. It is extremely detailed and the author has a knack for making you feel like you are part of the team.

2. The climbing portions are fun but have WAY too much exposition. Do we really need 15 pages of each and every hold and strategy for a single climb. I know it supposed to be immersive but to me, it gets a little tedious. 

3. The characters were a bit too bland. The surrounding plot was ok, but the interactions were just ordinary. 

4. I did have fun looking up some of the history on mountaineering and learning about the gear they used. 

5. That ending. Oh, no. Just no. That's all I'll say about that. 

Unless you really, really, really (I should put like 4 more reallys) like detailed climbing descriptions with a bit of intrigue, steer clear. Ugh, I just cannot get past how much I did not like the last third of the book. 

 

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is the second book I've read that is written by Dan Simmons. The previous one,The Terror had a similar documentary style storytelling that I really enjoyed. I love how both of these books blend history and fiction seamlessly, besides being excellent thrillers. While reading these books, you can see how cleverly Dan Simmons utilises the backdrop of the stories as the main driving force; as if it is a major character on its own. If you want to read a long thriller, rich with descriptive storytelling in a historical backdrop, The Abominable is highly recommended.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, FOR WHAAAAAAAAAT

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.

1st re-read of the year.
I remember being really excited when this book first came out (10 years ago), and then remember being a little bit underwhelmed, I wanted the same magic as The Terror & Drood but this felt bogged down with way too much detail

I kind of stand by my original 3 stars, I think this time I was able to lose myself in the book a little more, but a large part of the first 300 pages feels like a real chore, a mountaineering equipment sermon if you like. Part 2 & 3 are much better the action moves on swiftly and there are some brilliantly written perilous moments on mount Everest, in fact it all feels a little bit Alistair Maclean. Part 3 is called The Abominable. What could it possibly mean? Well I tell you this... It is definitely NOT what you think.