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Jeff Long - The Wall

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· Bibliographic citation:

· Author: Jeff Long  
· Title: The Wall: A Thriller
· Publisher: Atria Books
· Publication Date: Jan. 3, 2006
· ISBN: 978-0-7432-6616-1
· $ 24.00
· # pages: 286
· Genre: (if applicable) Thriller, Adventure Fiction

· Description:

On the vast, sunlit walls of the world’s greatest monolith, two veteran climbers unwittingly ascend into a vertical underworld.  In a place where obsession kills, they quickly fall prey to past loves, old demons, and ghostly revenge.

Once upon a time, thirty-five years ago, Hugh and Lewis were Yosemite legends.  El Capitan was their holy grail, and their destiny seemed written on its big walls.  Here they met the women who married them, then left them.  Hugh’s wife mysteriously disappeared into the desert.  Lewis’s wife is divorcing him.  Now the old friends reunite to climb El Cap one last time and make a fresh start.

But “the Captain” seems cursed this time around.  Even before the aging “wall rats” leave the ground, disaster strikes three young women high on a neighboring route.  Hugh discovers one body in the forest, and spies a second dangling a half mile overhead.  He and Lewis launch their ascent, desperate to leave the terrible omens behind.

But there is no escape.  Doubts haunt them, the elements plague them, and an eerie reptilian woman invades their sleep.  Nothing comes free up here.  Every vertical inch, the men must battle the stone, their aging bodies, fear, and the memories of great loves lost. 

They doggedly climb on, only to be drawn into a deadly rescue attempt by Augustine, a search and rescue expert.  Like a man possessed, he is hell bent on saving his lover, one of the doomed women.  Hugh ties in to the rope with him and climbs through a gauntlet of fire, ice, and deep gravity to the wreckage of the fall. 

There he and Augustine find a survivor, starved, half-mad, and holding a corpse.  The battered young woman raves that El Cap requires one final sacrifice.  On this tiny island in the sky, the rescuers become the victims, hounded by some ruthless spirit, and caught between the golden summit and terminal velocity. 

· Review Quotes/Appeal Factors:
“A bravura, chapter-long description of a forest fire and the truly shocking ending help to elevate The Wall far above an increasingly high pile of pedestrian thrillers.”  Entertainment Weekly

“The surprise ending is a true shocker in this hurtling, gripping read.” Publishers Weekly
 
“…a tense and taut thriller that keeps the reader enthralled right up to its harrowing and surprising denouement.”  The Denver Post

“(The Wall) will keep most readers from grasping what (Long) is up to until the moment he chooses, with great deliberation, to plunge them into a heart-stopping abyss.”  The Boulder Daily Camera

· What is it about this book that would appeal to a reader? 
My aim from the outset – when the reader follows a climber falling 3000 feet to her death – was to layer every fear possible onto a pell-mell vertical adventure.  At the same time, I wanted to explore two friends’ old dreams, share the world of big wall ascent, and write a ghost story.

· What other books are like it?
 One amazon.com reader wrote: The Wall is part Sideways (the movie) as two buddies relive the past as they're both about to embark on a life changes and part The Shining with a heaping table spoon of Touching the Void. 

I was thinking Deliverance and The Haunting of Hill House meet Cliffhanger.

· What does this work have in common with other works in the same genre?
Not much. 

· How is this work different from other works in the same genre?
A world tipped straight up and down, two old farts making their swan song on El Cap, and straight adrenaline.

· What would you like readers to know about you/your work?
When I start a book, I usually throw myself off a cliff and try to fly.  In this case, I threw a young woman off a cliff, and took it from there. 
  

· Links – author or publisher website, etc.

jefflongbooks.com

 

· Any additional information you'd like to provide to readers?
 Keep your knots tight.  Climb high.  Sleep low. 

 

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