Spooky spectre stalks the snowy summit WENDY HOLDEN
THIN AIR: A GHOST STORY by Michelle Paver (Orion £12.99)
SOME spiffing mountaineers tackle a tough Himalayan peak in the dying days of Empire.
Most of the last lot to attempt it died, but the new group’s doctor, who is also the narrator, gets to the grim heart of the mystery still surrounding one of the bodies.
Michelle Paver’s descriptions of Himalayan mountainclimbing are terrifyingly lifelike — the lashing winds, glittering ice: you can see it all.
Her depictions of its dangers are terrifyingly deathlike, too, and the growing menace of the high-altitude phantom is horrible.
The clever story centres on the class-consciousness within the expedition: the paradox of athletes aiming to push human endurance to its limits while wincing when people drop their aitches.
The peak is unclimbable for reasons other than geography. Paver’s style is lively and clear, and the tale just rips along.
It’s scary, but in a reassuringly old-fashioned way.
No moral relativism here, but lots of action, great characters and a nice big mountainous metaphor rearing above it all. Just fantastic.
THE HIDDEN PEOPLE by Alison Littlewood (Jo Fletcher £14.99)
NARRATOR Albie meets his cousin Lizzie at the 1851 Great Exhibition. This context of social progress is illusory.
When next he hears of her, pretty Lizzie has been killed by northern rustics who thought she was possessed by fairies.
Albie roars up to Halfoak, the guilty village, and encounters a society of ghoulish stereotypes mired in sinister superstition.
Rather bravely, given the circs, he moves into Lizzie’s ‘unlucky’ cottage and tries to get to the bottom of things. His saintly wife, Helena, comes up from London, but this only makes things worse: it’s not long before Albie is blundering around, wondering if it’s ‘him or them’.
The pace varies, and some characters are better than others, but there’s a lot that’s good. Littlewood does a great job writing in a quasi-Victorian manner throughout and the twist is brilliant.
A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS by Paul Tremblay (Titan Books £7.99)
PARENTS of sulky teens, step away now. This is your worst nightmare in book form. Narrator Merry’s sister Marjorie has driven their father to religion and their mother to booze. Inviting a TV crew to film all this is Dad’s surprising solution and, once they pitch up, the real problems begin.
The family becomes a satanic version of the Kardashians: every aspect of their decline is filmed, including an exorcism and a suicide attempt.
This horribly knowing novel moves back and forth in time, between literary forms and every imaginable horror trope, from the creepy child to the haunted doll’s house.
It’s a clever, if depressing, contemporary fable, with an excellent twist, and its terror comes from what’s real about it — family breakdown and poor mental health — rather than anything supernatural.