As a matter of fact, the blurb is more of a spoiler - and there's a great deal more to the latest Graham Joyce than even that nutshell synopsis makes plain.
Reading that back, it feels a little like I'm giving the game away, but that's not the case at all. Jake and Zoe have the whole place to themselves. Along with the whole of the rest of the town, evidently: there's not a soul about in all Saint-Bernard-en-Haut. It must have been evacuated, they reason. They encounter no-one, curiously - not even a search and rescue team - but of course the slopes would have been cleared, wouldn't they? Curiouser, however, is that on returning to their luxurious hotel, they find it empty. In short order, he digs her out, they dust themselves off and start down the very mountain which has so nearly meant the end of them both. It's a truly terrible moment.Īnd then, "like light through a stained-glass window in a cathedral," Jake's voice penetrates the powder, awakening his lover from her deathly slumber. Zoe feels "a terrible surrender" pass over her as her consciousness begins to shut down. Her panic-stricken struggle to survive is one of the most unnerving sequences in genre literature in recent memory - an almost unbearably tense exercise in the buried alive mode of claustrophobic horror - but for all her efforts, she cannot overcome nature it's no contest. It seems Zoe's thought that "she could die in that place, and happily," is to be put to the test, for when we come to with her, she is alone, upside down, and trapped under tonnes of hard-packed powder. The snow crashes down on us as it does Jake and Zoe, tearing the terrified young lovers from one another and us, momentarily, from them.
The couple have little time to prepare for its calamitous embrace - nor, indeed, do we (readers, meet the deep end). Because this - the tranquility, the silence, the undisturbed powder and the eerie feeling of proximity to an eagle's flight - was what it was all about." In a fit of unadulterated pleasure, Jake whoops at the mountain, and the mountain roars back, a "great mass of smoke and snow" on its breath: a n avalanche. At the crack of dawn on the second day of their return trip, Jake and Zoe get "up early to beat the holiday-making hordes for this first run of the morning. For them, it was love at first snow, a holiday romance that outlasted the holiday, but not the romance for fate, however, their meeting was but the first link in a great chain which, a decade later, leads the young couple back to the Alps - and into the arms of calamity. Years ago, Jake and Zoe met on the piste of a ski resort.
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