The White Road

Starred review from March 27, 2017
The ominous opening sentence, “I met the man who would save my life twice—and ultimately destroy it—on a potholed road in the arse-end of the Welsh countryside,” sets the stage perfectly for South African author Lotz’s outstanding thriller. The haunted speaker is Simon Newman, who fractured his skull in a climbing accident and now works as a barista. Simon seeks to add more adventure to his life by cofounding a new website, Journey to the Dark Side, which features spooky and scary images and videos. His search for unique content takes him to the wilds of Wales so he can enter the Cwm Pot cave system, where three previous explorers have met their deaths. His perilous exploit, aided by a possibly unbalanced guide, proves to be just the prologue to an attempt to scale Mount Everest, where other bodies await exploitation for profit. Lotz (Day Four) excels at making you feel like you’re there and her flawed lead sympathetic. Fans of Dan Simmons’s The Terror will be pleased. Agent: Oli Munson, A.M. Heath & Company.

March 15, 2017
After a near-death experience, an adrenaline junkie sets his sights on Mount Everest--accompanied by the ghost, or the madness, that followed him out of a cave.Simon drifts through life with little purpose or ambition besides seeking to boost traffic for the sensational website he runs with his buddy, Thierry. When Thierry convinces him to film a journey through the notorious Cwm Pot caves in Wales, in hopes that he will stumble onto the bodies of three spelunkers who died years before, Simon teams up with a shifty, unpredictable man named Ed whom he hires to be his guide. When rising waters trap them in the cave for hours, Simon barely makes it out alive, and he finds himself unable to recover any sort of equilibrium in the days following. Depressed and possibly hallucinating, Simon reluctantly agrees to Thierry's next big idea: that he should climb Everest in order to film the bodies of those who have died on the mountain. While pushing his body and mind to the absolute limit, Simon must confront the fact that he may have brought a -hitchhiker- back from the caves: either a malevolent spirit or the first stirrings of complete insanity. Lotz knows how to develop suspense and horror, and despite her rather pedestrian writing, the supernatural elements keep one engaged and guessing. It's not remotely believable that Simon would actually be able to climb Everest, but it makes no difference: the plot takes over where character development and authenticity fall short. The caving descriptions are specific enough to make the reader feel claustrophobic. Dark and unsettling, Lotz's (Day Four, 2015, etc.) latest is a quick and mindless read that taps into, and exploits, our deepest fears.

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April 15, 2017

Lotz (Day Four) returns with another creepy tale, this one about an adventurer who uncovers eerie happenings on Mount Everest. As the book opens, explorer Simon Newman has hired a guide to help him navigate a cave with a tragic history. When disaster strikes during his spelunking, Simon barely escapes with his life--but footage from the expedition goes viral on his website Journey to the Dark Side. Still reeling from his brush with death, he soon signs on to a trip up Mount Everest as a way to move forward. But as he and his fellow climbers ascend into the mountain's fabled "death zone," Simon begins to believe that something else is on the mountain with them. Skilled at creating real-world scenarios and imbuing them with a steadily growing feeling of danger and terror, Lotz brings readers to Everest, where the line between altitude-induced hallucinations and actual supernatural events may be very thin. VERDICT A solid pick for readers who enjoy modern horror by Dean Koontz and Stephen King. [See Prepub Alert, 11/21/6.]--Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins

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