The Abominable: A Novel Hardcover – October 22, 2013

Wow what a trip to mount Everest This book was fascinating I love Dan Simmons way of writing he makes you feel as if you're right there with the characters.I hold my breath each time I look at the peaks of mount Everest Wow What a ride highly recommended thank you Dan Simmons. I have downloaded a photo of Mt Everest to use as wallpaper on my phone and kindle. BTW: The Terror was awesome also.

It seems to me that the latest novel by Dan Simmons is receiving unjustified criticism. If you have read 'The Terror', 'Drood', or 'Black Hills', you will realize that this is how he writes. Yes, his older novels contained more horror and fantasy, but I think he has moved on to another genre. His latest novels are a mixture of historical fiction and alternate history with a dash of "thriller". This has to be one of his most clever novels. The twenty two page introduction of Jacob Perry's meeting with Dan Simmons was awesome. Since the novel had a medley of real climbers, like George Mallory, A.C. Irvine, and Felix Norton, it wasn't hard to believe that Perry was also genuine. Also impressive was how Simmons was able to keep the 663 page novel down to five main characters, thus giving the reader plenty of time to develop a rapport with the group. On page 247, we meet two fictional Sherpas (Ethnic name for the mountainous people of Nepal) Tenzing Bothia and Tejbir Norgay. They are minor characters at best, and I only bring it up to illustrate Simmons's probable extensive research for this novel. Mount Everest's summit was finally reached on 5/29/1953 by Edmund Hilary and his Sherpa (you guessed it) Tenzing Norgay. I noticed that the novel was thoroughly peppered with creative tidbits of information by the author. Well done.The novel starts out with Jacob Perry, Richard Deacon (the Deacon), and Jean-Claude Clairoux (J.C.) climbing the Matterhorn in the summer of 1924. As they are eating their newspaper wrapped lunch, they see the headline that says British climbers, George Mallory and A.C Irvine, were killed in an attempt to reach Mt. Everest's summit. According to German witness Bruno Sigl... Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer were following Mallory and Irvine when they were swept away by an avalanche and also killed. The Deacon, a WWI war hero and respected British climber, is a friend of the Bromley family. The Deacon, J.C., and Jacob meet with Percival's mother, Lady Bromley, who still thinks Percy might be alive and asks the group to find her son on Mount Everest. She will fund the trip but the trio must take Percy's cousin Reggie with them. The trio spend a lot of chapters practicing and gearing up for the 1925 trip. Once they get to the Bromley tea plantation in India to join cousin Reggie, they are surprised to find out that the cousin is a lady. Deacon protests taking a Lady to Mt. Everest, but has no choice since she controls the funds and also is an accomplished climber. Reggie's Indian right hand man and M.D. for the climb is Doctor Pasang. Now that the reader has met all five core characters, the group heads to Tibet to find out what really happened on that 1924 expedition.Once they have permission to enter Tibet (Nepal is off limits to visitors), the core five starts the journey to the mountain. They are warned at a Monastery to look out for bandits and Yeti, or the Abominable snowmen. Simmons's writing makes the journey so cold that I actually felt chilled reading the novel. The reader learns how the mountain is prosecuted with many Sherpas and animals carrying all the gear and food up and down the mountain. Base camp is pitched along with other camps going to higher elevations. This is where the story bursts with anticipation. Will they find Mallory and Irvine, or Bromley and Meyer? How did they really die? Who is following them? Is it Yeti, or the supposed German witness, Bruno Sigl? Will the core five make a run to the summit? The last 200 pages, or so are filled with intrigue and twists and turns that the reader truly doesn't see coming. In the afterword, Dan Simmons keeps the ruse alive that Jacob Perry (our narrator) is a real person. Simmons visits Perry's grave in the autumn of 2012 in a little Colorado town. He says on page 663, "I'm not a religious man, but I'd brought a bottle of the Macallan twenty-five-year-old single-malt Scotch and two small glasses that day. I filled both glasses, left one on the small headstone that said only JACOB WILLIAM PERRY April 2, 1902-May 28, 1992, and lifted the other." This is a wonderful novel, I highly recommend it.

This was a fantastic read. I read The Terror a few years back and was blown away by it, so I was eager to try this one when I heard of the similar premise about a group of men banding together for survival in the cold unknown. It was amazing in the first book, so why not this one?I'm very baffled by all the negative reviews here of this book. The general consensus seems to be that everyone here loved The Terror but found The Abominable to be slow, exhaustive, and far-fetched. Without giving anything away, I want to try to address some of the criticisms against the book:1) "Too much climbing technique explanation." I won't deny that there are a few dense parts where Dan Simmons delves into deep description about climbing techniques to the reader, but I also don't think that it was so much so that it felt like reading a training manual. I recall maybe two chapters that covered the characters undergoing specific lessons and tests on how to climb, and I found these to be completely essential to the book. The explanation of crampon devices in particular are so integral to the book later on once they reach the mountain, as it becomes the primary means of how they all ascend where many other parties had failed, and I would have only understood what they were doing had Simmons not so meticulously and visually described it to me earlier.2) "Too much build-up that took too long to get to the mountain." I'm not going to lie, it does take awhile for the main action of the mountain to happen. The characters don't even reach the mountain until page 250 or so, but I did not find anything leading up to this point to be boring by any means. Simmons took a lot of time in these first 250 pages to build up the mystery of the missing Percy Bromley and wove a very tangled, intriguing web that completely invested me. Jake, Deacon, and J.C. (the recovery team paid to find Bromley) spend a lot of time before they reach the mountain interviewing and piecing together the different accounts from different people who saw Bromley on the mountain, only to find that nothing adds up - someone is lying or there's a bigger conspiracy at play. The build-up was written and woven together so well that I was completely hooked by the time they reached the mountain and hardly noticed the 250 pages that it had taken to get there.3) "The final revelation in the mystery is not believeable." This is the only criticism that I will partially agree with. When the final twist is revealed about what really happened to Bromely and the motivations behind everything that transpired with him, I did find it far-fetched. Some reviewers here seemed to be disappointed that it was not a mysterious monster (i.e., the Yeti) that caused Bromley's disappearance, but I rather liked that it was not fantastical. I already read that in The Terror, and I appreciated the different approach here. I was able to buy who was behind it no problem, but the why was slightly outlandish to me. I think that Simmons was working really hard for me to suspend my disbelief because it a pretty hard sell, but I didn't find it so ridiculous that it completely ruined the novel for me. The whole story is worth reading, and the ending definitely stayed with me for quite some time.I really believe that this book deserves a try, despite the all the negative reviews here. I cared about each and every one of the main characters in the recovery team and was on the edge of my seat the entire read rooting for their survival even though I knew they all could not possibly prevail. It's hard not to compare it to The Terror because they share the same frigid and cold atmospheres and a story about a band of men trying to survive in horrid conditions, but that is where the similarities end. The Abominable should be looked at individually, and I thought it was still a worthwhile and great read.

I loved this book! A real page-turner, that I plan to read again. Mr. Simmons has. A new fan, one who is happy to see there's A large catalog of writings by this gentleman.

I read The Terror first and I was hoping for more of the same - a beautifully written alternate history, cross with a bit of horror. I got two of those from The Abominable. But beautifully written it is not. It felt pretty bland.What particularly grated on me was the stiff, unrealistic dialog that sounded like a historian giving a lecture, not a conversation between friends. For example, here's one character talking to his friend about what sort of gun had fired a bullet they'd found."Eight millimeter", whispered the Deacon. "Popular with the Austrians and Hungarians in pistols designed before the war by Karel Krnka and Georg Roth. The most common pistol - first used by the Austro-Hungarian cavalry, later produced by the Germans for infanty officers - was the Roth Steyr M. nineteen oh-seven semiautomatic pistol".Really?! I'm pretty sure that "An eight millimeter semiautomatic pistol" would have sufficed if Simmons wasn't so intent on showing off his research.Give it a miss unless you're fascinated by the early climbing attempts of Everest.

Dan Simmons is priceless writing. Great story with a lot of historic information to give it a good base. The characters are solid and well-developed. The story is well developed. Good reading, as usual.

Dan Simmons is a joy and a privlege to read. The story is engaging, and the writing has that sprinkle of fairy dust that is so rare.

Wow - the Terror was fantastic but this was just terrible. Generally Dan is a great storyteller but I just couldn't finish the book. Carrion Comfort started off slow too but boy did it hit Mach V halfway through. This one simply didn't leave first gear. The plot could be summarised in a few chapters but the bulk of text was dedicated specifically to climbing and it just went on and on - one foot here and one hand there and up we went. I was patiently looking forward to total immersion but it just didn't happened. I'd give this one a miss unless your really fascinated in the technicalities of mountaineering.

I read the Terror several months ago and keep waiting for the story called the Abominable to have monsters dominate the landscape was constantly surprised and delighted chapter after chapter with new twists and turns in the plot. Very well done. I will be looking for more Dan Simmons soon.