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.