Book Review: The White Road

The White Roadby Sarah LotzMulholland Books, 2017There's a scarifying bit at the beginning of Sarah Lotz's new novel The White Road, and it's not the bit you might expect. The novel opens with young slacker Simon Newman heading to a series of caves that were the site of a tragic spelunking accident, and he's being guided to the very spot of that accident by a creepy guy named Ed, who's one of the few people willing to break the law in order to escort a nosy outsider to the dead bodies that still remain deep underground. Readers who are familiar with Lotz's fantastic cruise-ship nightmare novel Day Four will know what to expect of the cave-climbing sequences in which Ed leads Simon to the corpses (Simon wants to film the whole thing to post for hits online, in case you were wondering whether or not you should, you know, like him) – and those readers won't be disappointed: the first 60 pages of The White Road cannot fail to hook the reader and absolutely terrify those unlucky enough to have even a touch of claustrophobia.But that's not the scarifying bit, not really. No, that comes a dozen pages in, when Simon pauses to tell us a little about Ed:

Back then, whenever I met someone new, I used to do this thing where I'd try and figure out their film or TV character equivalent – a dumb mental tic that started when I was in hospital recovering from the climbing accident. I knew immediately that my best mate Thierry was Ray, Dan Ackroyd's character in Ghostbusters (American, pudgy, nerdy, endearing); Cosimo, my manager at Mission: Coffee, was Tony Soprano mercurial, morbid, a mouth-breather with major mommy issues). Ed was easy. He was Quint, the unhinged, predatory shark hunter from Jaws. Same cruel smirk and scar fetish.

Habitual readers of high-octane thrillers are accustomed to setting aside their readerly dignity, but even that elastic process has its limits – having a thriller writer come right out and tell you that she's going to let various miscellaneous screenwriters do her creative work for her should come about as close to breaking the system as anything could. I don't know anything about Dan Ackroyd's character in Ghostbusters, so I therefore know nothing about Thierry; I know very little about Tony Soprano (and readers in ten years won't know anything at all, nor should they), so I'll know very little about Cosimo. And although I'm familiar with Steven Spielberg's movie adaptation of Jaws, my first reaction to the comparison wasn't Ah, so that's what Ed is like – it was Kinda wish Lotz had, you know, made up a character of her own for the occasion. Since she's writing a novel and all.Actually it doesn't take many pages of The White Road before the reader realizes that this isn't quite entirely a novel – it's much closer to a screenplay with some bloating, which very much wasn't the case with Day Four and may, alarmingly, indicate a creative shift. But luckily, what the book lacks in texture it makes up for with hurtling, breathless downhill ice-skating. Feckless Simon's caving trip goes horribly wrong almost immediately and he barely survives it – but the film footage goes explosively viral, which, this being the 21^st century, creates an immediate demand to top it with something even more viral. And if the key to the first video's success was the footage of those poor dead cavers, Dan Ackroyd reasons, more success will certainly come from more bodies – and what's the biggest open-air gravesite in the world? Why, the frozen slopes and crevasses of Mount Everest, of course! The new plan is that Simon will trek up the South Face to the notorious Death Zone, film all the corpsicles, and then go viral all over again.He doesn't know anything about how to summit Everest – he's a barista! But he attaches himself to a group of more seasoned mountaineers, joining along in the round-robing introductions that will serve to remind you, if you needed a reminder, that of all the unlikable characters in the book (there are no likable characters in the book), Simon, our hero, is easily, blandly the worst:

Then it was my turn: Hi, I'm Simon Newman. I'm here because I'm hoping to film a bunch of dead climbers so that my mate can exploit their deaths on a website. I spend my days serving coffee to rich assholes like you, and I have no fucking idea how I'm going to deal with this whole thing. I couldn't compete with their climbing achievements, but I could give them the full Charming Si treatment: 'What an act to follow! Hi, I'm Simon Newman. I live in London, but I'm a filmmaker, and website developer – well, I'm trying to be one,' – a small, modest chuckle – 'and I'm really looking forward to getting to know all of you. Can I just say that all your accomplishments are really impressive.'

The bulk of the rest of the book is that Everest adventure, complete with thrills, chills, half a dozen orthographical gimmicks, and the single most predictable mystery villain since the Nixon administration. Lotz knows exactly how to do this sort of schlock-adventure crafting, and The White Road, through the effrontery of nakedly disappointing at every single turn, somehow doesn't disappoint, particularly in its breathless third act, which becomes so jumpy and distractible that the forward momentum starts to feel a bit surreal. And the addition of a Bibliography at the very end? Comic genius.