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

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It’s a hypothesis, and it makes me feel slightly better. I’ve put a frame around the wrongness. I’ve contained it.” The Sherpas are wrong. This mountain has no spirit, no sentience and no intent. It’s not trying to kill us. It simply is.” [famous last words…] 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 *

The slowly building sense of dread in this book may not be for everyone. If you're looking for jump-in-your-face scares, you won't find any. I could (and did) read this book alone late at night. But if you're in the mood for a subtle buildup of terror, I think this is a great book. I don't know why I didn't see it coming but when Stephen was abandoned at Camp 3, it was awhile until I truly thought he was a goner and that all of his paranoid imaginings had actualized.. The ending answered all of my questions, which I always love in a thriller and a ghost story. Paver's writing style managed to read like a diary or first person tale from an actual survivor of a mountain climbing disaster. She expertly set up a failed 1907 Lyell Expedition and explained the impact it had on climbers in the 1935 Cotterell expedition at hand. Because of this, combined with the likability of everyman narrator Stephen Pearce, I was pulled in from the beginning.

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This is pacey, readable historical fiction with a good sense of period and atmosphere. I enjoyed Pearce’s narration, and the one-upmanship type of relationship with his brother adds an interesting dimension to the expedition dynamics. However, I never submitted sufficiently to Paver’s spell to find anything particularly scary. I’ll try again with her other ghost story, Dark Matter, about an Arctic expedition from the same time period. I’m sitting on the floor by the latrine on the delayed and crowded 16.47 from Marylebone to Haddenham… Reading thin air, utterly hooked, and reliving my own alpine climbing days… the discomfort, pain, cold, hunger, exhaustion… making the best of an unplanned overnight bivi…

Thin Air is a must-read for any would-be or actual adventurer, mountaineer or weekend warrior… If you only read one ghost story this year, make it this one!” Impeccably researched, carefully controlled and terrifically told, Thin Air is a brief but brilliant exploration of the extent of human endeavour. It’s about the incredible things people, when pushed, can do… and the terrible things, too.” It becomes hard for him not to give at least some credence to local folklore when Kanchenjunga is so elementally powerful. How could it not be possessed of the capacity for anger or punishment? Is it any wonder that the Sherpas find gods and devils there? There's a good narrative strand of sibling rivalry between the narrator, the mountain expedition's doctor, and his elder brother, who is the expedition's leader. But it is the slow build-up of tension from the supernatural elements that makes this book so good. The climax is gripping and horrifying without being gory and then there is a very moving aftermath. I've been generous with the stars because this is one of those fairly rare occasions when the prose and the narration really mesh. Sure, you get good readers reading good stories, but sometimes they go beyond this; there is a synergy in which the narrator isn't just reading the words, he's telling his story. There is no Michelle Paver and there is no Daniel Weyman, there is just Stephen Pearce talking directly to the listener.

Summary

And now like Pegasus I ride the stars, I walk the spellbound moon. The horse of darkness treads the sky And I am with him…’ But there is something else beyond the genius loci. The real horror in Thin Air lies in the sheer scale of things: the height of the pinnacles, the depth of the crevasses, the cold and the silence, the distance from anything familiar, the huge otherness. Impeccably researched, carefully controlled and terrifically told, Thin Air is a brief but brilliant exploration of the extent of human endeavour. It’s about the incredible things people, when pushed, can do… and the terrible things, too.

Michelle Paver's descriptions of Himalayan mountain-climbing are terrifyingly lifelike - the lashing winds, glittering ice: you can see it all...Paver's style is lively and clear; and the tale just rips along...Just fantastic -- Wendy Holden * DAILY MAIL *The slow reveal of what really happened during the previously expedition is perfectly timed and the poignancy of the tragedy is a visceral blow to the senses. This may be a ghost story but it also goes further by showing us that the we can all be tainted by the knowledge of evil even when we are not the direct protagonist.