Ugh, I had such high hopes for this. Basically, what happens is two people are caught in an avalanche, and when they get themselves out, they find that everyone else has diasappeared, and they can't contact anyone outside the mountain village where they're staying.

Well, that sounded cool. Maybe there was an alien invasion! or a zombie epidemic! Or even maybe they're dead and it's the afterlife?

Nope, it's just that

one of the people is in a coma or something and it's all in her head. Wow. Amazing.

Other things that were not awesome about this book:
--There is almost zero character development beyond the fact that they like to ski.
--There are several cringeworthy sex scenes.
--The writing is painfully bad. Some of my "favorite" bits:
"Jake had close-cropped black hair and baby-blue peepers"
PEEPERS. Really.

"His skin was like parchment in this light, she decided, holy parchment, and his glittering blue eyes and his nut-brown eyebrows and the hint of crimson of his lips were like a monk’s illustrations on a sacred manuscript."
Then about two pages later, she addresses this holy parchment with the remark, "Your eyes look like pissholes in the snow."

This would be a good pool or beach read. It's set in the French Alps, so it may cool you down in the hot summer sun. A couple go out for an early morning ski run and are caught in an avalanche. They manage to survive and make it down the mountain, only to discover that the quaint ski village is empty. There is no one around. No one. Slowly, they discover that there is something wrong. I guessed the twist fairly early on, but I enjoyed the book and found the ending to be very poignant.

No idea why this would be getting high reviews...

On first reading the blurb of this book I found myself wondering what on earth Graham Joyce was up to. Joyce, as original a fantasist as the literary world has to offer, seemed to be going down a fairly well-worn route, if the description of the plot was anything to go by. A husband and wife, caught in an avalanche in the Pyrenees, make their way back to their holiday village, only to find it deserted, and all their efforts to leave bring them back to the same place. I mean, it's obvious what's going on here, right? The reader is right there, one step ahead of he characters.

But only one step. They're not dumb. The work it out, too. The question is, what happens next? The question is, why is this happening at all? Of course, the reader will work out the next thing early on, too, as they're supposed to, but this one is something the characters cannot or will not grasp, for a very good reason. And as the lights flicker and the shadows close in and the ghostly men get nearer, you know what must happen, but instead of being a hackneyed cop-out cliche, it's Hitchcock's old lesson about suspense being when you know the bomb under the desk is going to go off, and the ending is almost unbearable.

I was explaining this to my wife.

'Because it's a love story,' I told her, and she laughed.

'How did you manage to accidentally trick yourself into reading a love story?'

'Because it's Graham Joyce.'

Wow. Couldn't put it down. Fundamentally a story about love.

2.3

Husband and Wife, Jake and Zoe, find themselves in the middle of an avalanche on a ski holiday, and their anniversary trip only gets stranger from there. Injured and exhausted, when they trek back to their hotel, it's to find the entire town is gone. As they begin to notice peculiarities in their selves, and in the world around them, there seems only one possible answer...

This book read like an episode of The Twilight Zone. The beginning of the book read like a good episode. The characters of Jake and Zoe are not dynamic, 3-dimmensional figures, but they don't necessarily have to be. There isn't much context to the story, but, again, there doesn't have to be. Not for that floaty, not-quite-right, Anybody Anywhere, haunted sort of feeling.

I got excited as the weirdness of the story set in. The strange realizations of the memories and their reactions to things, the looping paths and the car on a cliff. It was all so foreboding and surreal. If the book had continued that way, with a fog over everything, I think I would have really enjoyed it.
And still, I did enjoy the genuinely frightening addition of other people, and the weird old building next to the hotel. The need for answers without having enough words to actually formulate the question.

Where things go wrong for me, is in the, very quick, realization of death. All the tension dropped, the dark and confusing quality dissipated, and everything sort of stopped moving forward. Now, the death of it all was pretty obvious, but it being obvious us to and it being obvious to them are very different things, and, in fact, the ending was also obvious to a reader, but apparently not obvious to the characters, so there's a disconnect there for what's supposed to be clear and what isn't.

The writing quality wasn't bad, and the first half or so of this book was gripping, but in all I felt let down by the direction of the story.