I feared the night falling, and the next appearance of ‘it’.

Throughout the course of the book, the main character, Stephen, begins to unravel, so that the final chapters are filled with dread. That said, Thin Air has more than its fair share of ‘moments’ because that’s what Michelle writes so well. They draw on similar concepts, so it’s natural that first time reading will contain more shocks. In vice-versa, I think it’s extremely likely I wouldn’t have found Dark Matter as scary if I had read Thin Air first. However, I want to make really clear that that isn’t because it isn’t good. I think that because of the similarities with Dark Matter, Thin Air didn’t scare me quite so much. The natives are once again deeply suspicious and wary of the destination, and there is a lot of dismissive snobbery from the wealthy and/or esteemed mountaineers. It’s set in the 1930s and once more focuses on a group of men embarking on an expedition, this time up Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas. There is quite a lot of familiar territory in this book as covered by Dark Matter.

Dark Matter properly gave me the chills, so I was looking forward to more of the same. The reason I jumped at it was because I had read Michelle’s previous ghost story Dark Matter three months previously. The author provides lots of useful background information, to make for a most delightful, well-written and entertaining read.I bought Thin Air from South Kensington Books during a day working in London. The sense of menace builds nicely to an agreeably shocking climax. Pearce begins to notice some rather unusual things, but he (and the reader) cannot be sure if these unaccountable phenomena are caused by altitude sickness, or by something more malevolent and frightening. The climb is indeed an immense challenge, fraught with danger and difficulties, and the breathtaking beauties and associated horrors of the mountainous range are superbly described by the author. While Stephen Pearce climbed the Alps in his youth, he is certainly not sufficiently acclimatised to tackle such a testing peak. Pearce is escaping from a broken engagement in London, and has been invited to form part of the expedition by his older brother Kits as the medical officer. Whilst in Darjeeling Stephen Pearce meets a member of that 1906 climb, Charles Tennant, a curiously irascible, but frightened old man, who lives in constant sight of the mountain that caused him to lose both of his feet to frostbite. They are following in the footsteps of a notorious failed attempt of 1906, led by Edmund Lyell, and which resulted in the deaths of most of the party. Stephen Pearce is part of a small party of climbers that are to attempt the hitherto unscaled mountain of Kanchenjunga, the third highest summit in the world.

Thin air a ghost story