On the vast, sunlit walls of the world's greatest monolith, two veteran climbers unwittingly ascend into a vertical underworld. In a place where obsession kills, they quickly fall prey to past loves, old demons, and ghostly revenge.
Once upon a time, thirty-five years ago, Hugh and Lewis were Yosemite legends. El Capitan was their holy grail, and their destiny seemed written on its big walls. Here they met the women who married, then left them. Hugh's wife mysteriously disappeared into the desert. Lewis's wife is divorcing him. Now, the old friends reunite to climb El Cap one last time and make a fresh start.
But "the Captain" seems cursed this time around. Even before the aging "wall rats" leave the ground, disaster strikes three young women high on a neighboring route. Hugh discovers one body in the forest and spies a second dangling a half mile overhead. He and Lewis launch their ascent, desperate to leave the terrible omens behind.
But there is no escape. Doubts haunt them, the elements plague them, and an eerie reptilian woman invades their sleep. Nothing comes free up here. Every vertical inch, the men must battle the stone, their aging bodies, fear, and the memories of great loves lost.
They doggedly climb on, only to be drawn into a deadly rescue attempt by Augustine, a search-and-rescue expert. Like a man possessed, he is hell-bent on saving his lover, one of the doomed women. Hugh ties in to the rope with him and climbs through a gauntlet of fire, ice, and deep gravity to the wreckage of the fall.
There, he and Augustine find a survivor, starved, half-mad, and holding a corpse. The battered young woman raves that El Cap requires one final sacrifice. On this tiny island in the sky, the rescuers become the victims, hounded by some ruthless spirit and caught between the golden summit and terminal velocity.
Industry Reviews
What was to be a glorious final climb to the top of El Capitan by two longtime friends becomes a death-plagued nightmare. With his first-hand experience as a climber, Long (The Reckoning, 2004, etc.) is able to take readers places they might never have thought to go and make them, if not exactly enjoy the experience, at least feel fairly brave for having gone. The protagonists of his latest novel are veteran climbers Hugh Glass and his buddy Lewis, who first made the 3,000-foot vertical climb to "El Cap," the largest rock face in the U.S., 35 years ago. Accompanied by the women they would marry, the friends went on to conquer many other heights before their careers separated them. The adventure starts ominously when Hugh, out for a pre-climb hike at the base of the cliff, barely dodges a falling body. The body belongs to a member of a three-woman team that had been taking a new route to the top. Before Hugh can notify the authorities, he has a spooky encounter with Joshua, a madman living on the land, who makes off with the corpse as soon as Hugh leaves. It's downhill (figuratively) from there. Over pre-climb drinks, Hugh, whose beloved but demented wife disappeared in the Arabian Desert, learns that Lewis's marriage has fallen apart and meets Augustine, an intense search-and-rescue expert who tells the climbers that he will be heading up on the same route at the same time to rescue his girlfriend. Disregarding all gloomy warnings, Hugh and Lewis launch an assault on El Capitan that will be distinguished by hideous weather, a forest fire and disastrous encounters with Augustine and the remnants of the female team. Heart-stopping vertical adventure relieved from time to time by old-guy angst. (Kirkus Reviews)
