Unleashing a torrent of metaphors referencing rot and religious imagery, Joyce nearly overwhelms the book’s quietly creepy atmosphere. Disembodied voices ripple along a frozen creek, mysterious black birds haunt a would-be getaway car and “real world” visions of a still-bustling scene in the hotel lobby generate enough nightmarish unease to rival the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s “The Shining.” These fleeting encounters along with an unharmed yet still secret pregnancy keep Zoe and the reader guessing just where the couple have landed while her husband, intriguingly, accepts his fate. All the while, Joyce ratchets up the tension as Zoe keeps uncovering haunting details. Or does he?įacing an apparent eternity together in Eden-like isolation, the couple eventually try to enjoy a permanent vacation, indulging in top shelf wines, idyllic skiing and an empty hotel to satisfy their suddenly accelerated libido. The question soon becomes whether the couple truly has survived the avalanche, and it’s one Joyce resolves before the novel’s halfway point. Food abandoned by an apparently hasty hotel staff never spoils, candles burn for days and every attempt to leave brings them back to the deserted village where they started with increasingly unsettling effect. Though both escape in a description harrowingly detailed enough to unnerve claustrophobic readers, they emerge to find every living thing surrounding them has vanished, seemingly evacuated with shocking speed and efficiency.Ĭut off from all communications and determined to get off the mountain before the next avalanche strikes, the couple soon discover their new world follows perplexing rules. Set in the Pyrenees mountains around Chamonix, France, the story follows Zoe and Jake, a thirtysomething married couple from Britain splurging on a ski getaway that quickly turns disastrous when the two are caught in an avalanche. With TV’s “Lost” having found its conclusion, and its successor on the pop culture landscape still missing in its own right, fans longing for a mysterious and mystical world to explore might consider visiting “The Silent Land,” a tautly rendered new novel by British writer Graham Joyce.
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