This wasn't terrible, but certain parts were fucking annoying.

For one, the entire cast is garbage. All throwaways. Nobody you haven't read about a million times. In fact, these people are so generic the main character, Simon (or Si), thinks of them as Depressed Harry Potter and Hannibal Lecter, or other famous people. The cast? Nothing to see here.

The plot is all over the place. You start out the book with a prologue that lasts 20% of the whole book. I thought the novel was gonna be about Si in that cave and then I'm thrust into a different scenario and made to get to know new people. Okay. Whatever. Moving on.

Sarah Lotz doesn't do scary well. She seems to have a very old school sense of horror: seeing things from the corner of your eye, eerie presences, hair raising on the back of your neck... That would be all well and good if she could pull it off. She doesn't. Here it comes off as cheesy and she ends up looking like a try-hard.

Can we please stop with the goddamn blogger characters in horror fiction? The only thing horrifying about them is how unsuitable they are for horror novels. Paul Trembley proved as much in his godawful A Head Full of Ghosts. They kill the terror with their text-speech.

4 real #nojoke tl;dr but this book is totes meh

My final complaint is the godawful formatting. I hope they fix that shit before publication because reading strikethrough text is fucking distracting and annoying and FUCK YOU, FORMATTER!

I did like the way Lotz wrote and the mixed up structure. That's probably the only reason this isn't a one-star review. It wasn't like everything else, and I commend her for trying something different. That being said, you need to leave epistolary style where it belongs, in the 19th century.

In summation: I was hoping for a chiller and I got a decent mountain adventure. No big loss, as the book was provided free of charge in return for this here review.

Final Judgment: Not terrible.

I love Sarah Lotz – her books don’t fit into any specific genre and often defy description, they are just damned good. Simon Newman risked his life to get people to subscribe to his “Journey ro the Dark Side” website when he filmed his harrowing trip into the bowels of the earth at Cwm Pot. Simon’s guide nearly killed him, but he emerge from the caverns with freaky scary video of dead cavers that made him an internet sensation. Now ready for his next adventure, Simon prepares to trek up Mount Everest, where he will encounter an old mystery and the presence he felt in the caverns will make a return. So creepy, so good, so sorry the book is over!