Before Dan opened his door to find a wounded woman who had escaped from the tormentors in the mountain, his life had become rather quiet. He and the eight other people in the mostly abandoned town had become friends. They spent peaceful evenings around the campfire and even made vague plans to journey east one day and leave the ominous mountain behind.
But the woman's arrival changes everything.
Who is she? How does she know so much about Dan's brother, who is still held captive in the mountain? Why are long-forgotten memories rising to the surface? And why does Dan feel so compelled to keep her presence in his house a secret?
This chilling, mesmerising story is narrated by Dan, one of what once was a large group of survivors who live in a town situated at the base of a mountain. We don't know what they are survivors of, we just know that they had escaped from something that had held them captive and tortured them somewhere inside the mountain. Something that they lived in fear of and the reason that they had all sworn never to return into the mountain. We never find out what was actually inside the mountain,wether it was other humans or of alien origin. I personally imagined that it was aliens that were capturing, experimenting on, torturing and possibly brain washing humans, that could possibly explain the mass amnesia that the group were suffering from at the beginning of the story. You would have thought that Dan and the remaining survivors would have wanted to get as far away from the mountain as possible. But there was a reason why Dan were compelled to stay close to the entrance into the mountain. As the story unfolded and their memories returned, Dan would learn about unknown connections between himself and other members of the group and would find himself encountering betrayal, suspicion,danger and life changing decisions. What did fate have in store for the friends and will they all survive to reach the end the their journey? The descriptions of the setting for this book were beautifully written, the contrast between the safe atmosphere of the town and the menacing evil of the mountain. The sense of the unknown that was beyond the line of trees that marked the passage away from the town.
This is a very well written, atmospheric story that has a prevailing sense of foreboding permeating the pages but also contains elements of survival and hope. The author has assembled a fantastic cast of diverse, realistic characters that you can't help routing for as the story unfolds. I really enjoyed this enthralling story, this is the first of this author's books that I have read and I would happily read more of his books in the future.
AUTHOR BIO
Shawn Smucker is the award-winning author of Light from Distant Stars, the young adult novels The Day the Angels Fell and The Edge of Over There, and the memoir Once We Were Strangers. He lives with his wife and six children in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. You can find him online at www.shawnsmucker.com.
PUBLICATION DATE: 20th June 2020
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