Thin Air: The most chilling and compelling ghost story of the year

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So I got halfway through this book and realize that absolutely nothing has happened yet. I got tired of waiting for them to get to the punchline so I'm putting this book down. It was like nothing's happening.... nothing's happening.... ok he saw a shadow. And nothing's happening again. Paver develops these tensions very well. Then the gradual development of a sense of haunting, initially denied by the empirical Stephen:

Michelle Paver – Creator of Legends Michelle Paver – Creator of Legends

perfectly executed little ghost story set in the Arctic wastes in the late 1930s, featuring the adventures of AN AWESOME HUSKY NAMED ISAAK and I suppose some humans as well. Once more we are in a cold, secluded, location, the Hilamayas instead of the Arctic. At first glance, this is quite similar to her previous story but the feel is quite different. I would guess that this kind of tale requires a remote and dangerous setting, somewhere secluded and cut off the real world. Kangchenjunga, as well as other mountains, are places of wonder, where the immense scale becomes alien, and where euphoria morphs with desolation. Additionally, opting for the 1930s golden era of mountain climbing adds somehow that fashionable 'old' feel to it.And my enjoyment and shiver mounted with the appearance of the terrifying object, deployed so brilliantly in one of the best and most shivery 'ghosts' I have ever read - W.W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw. Paver has an object, and I whimpered anxiously as it brought the added accretion of my memory of Jacobs' story into the room. * LADY FANCIFULL * What do I mean by wrong? Well I don’t mean ghosts. Not in the sense of disembodied spirits, I don’t believe in them. […] But energy, now. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so isn’t it at least possible that some kind of energy—perhaps magnetic, or even some force of emotion—may have lingered here for years? And perhaps—perhaps there’s something about me that makes me a sort of physical medium for that energy: like a battery, or a lightning rod? It completely transported me away from the darkness of my own life and if even for a brief moment made me forget and drew me in so wholly that I was lost in this wonderful book, and that is something that seems to be very rare these days. Paver has an object, and I whimpered anxiously as it brought the added accretion of my memory of Jacobs'story into the room. * LADY FANCIFULL *

Thin Air – Michelle Paver

In 1935 Dr. Stephen Pearce and his brother Kits are part of a five-man mission to climb the most dangerous mountain in the Himalayas, Kangchenjunga. Thirty years before, Sir Edmund Lyell led an ill-fated expedition up the same mountain: more than one man did not return, and the rest lost limbs to frostbite. “I don’t want to know what happened to them. It’s in the past. It has nothing to do with us,” Dr. Pearce tells himself, but from the start it feels like a bad omen that they, like Lyell’s party, are attempting the southwest approach; even the native porters are nervous. And as they climb, they fall prey to various medical and mental crises; hallucinations of ghostly figures on the crags are just as much of a danger as snow blindness. If you have ever wanted to climb a mountain or to have some sort of insight into the preparation both mentally and physically, of the extreme effort it takes to even attempt something like this, then this is the book for you. * THE BOOK TRAIL * Looking for a proper ghost story? Thin Air is a creepy, compelling tale of a Himalayan climbing expedition, where strange events on the mountain stir dread and panic.” Gosh, but Thin Air is a creepy story. Paver squeezes the last drop of desolation and isolation out of her Himalayan setting…Stephen's fraught relationship with his brother Kits, was one of the main conflicts of the story. Besides Stephen, and sometimes Major Cotterell, I didn't like any of the white members of the expedition. They were either driven by greed and pride or cowardly in the face of injustice or common sense. It gave me a smug sense of satisfaction when Kits received his just desserts. Thin Air is, like Paver's previous ghost story Dark Matter, a truly frightening ghost story. Something of an outsider in the group and deeply resentful of Kits - who despite being less intelligent than Stephen is far wealthier and more successful and something of a bully - Stephen is horribly isolated in his fear and terrified not only of the dark presence that plagues him but, as a doctor, also of the idea that he might somehow be losing his rational, scientific grip on reality. The terror that unfolds is oppressive and, despite the scale of Stephen's surroundings, inescapably claustrophobic. It's often vague and a lot goes unsaid, which for me is always more unnerving than detailed description. It's the sense of fear itself and Stephen's powerlessness that are the truly frightening thing here. The descriptions of the Himalayas themselves are also powerfully evocative. Michelle Paver was born in central Africa, but came to England as a child. After gaining a degree in biochemistry from Oxford University, she became a partner in a city law firm, but eventually gave that up to write full-time. All mountains are killers, but ours is worse than most," says Stephen, the protagonist of Thin Air as he climbs Kangchenjunga, the sacred mountain in the Himalayas. If you didn’t think it was possible for a book to be scary, just you wait. I can see this being one of those books I’ll enjoy reading year after year, without it losing any of its impact. It’s a powerful and genuinely chilling book.