Ok it's been over a month and I'm finally ready to talk about it.
Spoilers for The Abominable by Dan Simmons below (aka the worst book ever, just the most infuriating thing, made me lose my will to live a little bit, it was really that bad)
Okay so I read The Terror and I liked it. Did it have big issues (usually queer or woman-shaped issues)? Sure. But it was well written and interesting and it kept me hooked and most importantly, it was about a bunch of people freezing to death which is like... one of my favourite genres of stuff.
So when I found out that he wrote another doomed cold weather historical-fiction novel about a failed 1925 expedition up Everest to find Mallory and Irvine, well, I was all in. That topic is only one of my main special interests, it really did not take much to get me on board.
It started off well, the characters were interesting enough and it was clearly (as with all of Dan's stuff) very well researched. The book was, if anything, too well researched as he spent a third of the book justifying the fact that the characters had use of far better equipment (down jackets, 12 point crampons, german-style ice axes and jumars) than the 1924 expedition. As a bit of a weirdo about this stuff, I enjoyed this, I suspect that others would not have, but all was fine so far.
It was at this point that he introduced a secondary motive for the team climbing the mountain - a paid job to find the body of one of the climbers cousin who reportedly also died on Everest in 1924. Cousin Percy was introduced as a cad and a rogue who frequented German and Austrian brothels that catered to gay men. Colour me intrigued.
Add to this the fact that this is supposed to be a horror novel and people keep bringing up the yeti, I'm having a brilliant time.
So the set up we have: the fact that this is billed as a HORROR novel on the heels of The Terror (which had a creature), the mission to find dead gay cousin Percy and the mission to find dead gay Mallory and Irvine.
Fast forward to the end of the book, (bear in mind that we are 85% of the way through a 700 page novel) and finally the yetis attack and kill a bunch of people. Huge. I'm having a blast.
Then it all goes to shit. The reveals happen in this order.
1) the yetis are, in fact, just evil Nazi mountain climbers dressed up as yetis
2) bad gay cousin Percy was not actually bad or gay. After going to great pains to specify how naughty and gay he was, his gayness is revoked. It is revealed that he was actually spying on Germany after the war, and is a great guy and thusly his gayness is revoked.
3) it is revealed that the reason it is so important to find dead not-gay cousin Percy is that he came up Everest in 1924 in order to exchange some important spying info with a young Austrian man. Why they did this in tibet is very poorly explained, as is their decision to make, and I quote, a strategic retreat up the tallest mountain on earth. I cannot stress how little sense any of this makes, like it could not make any less sense. They are doing an exchange of extremely volatile political information up Everest with a band of evil nazi climbers chasing after them. It's beyond braindead.
And now for the kicker....
5) they find dead not-gay cousin Percy's frozen body and reveal that the information he had been getting from the Austrian man was..... pictures of Adolf Hitler fucking little boys. All of this was for gay pedo Hitler photos.
After the insane level of historical detail that went into justifying the fucking CLIMBING EQUIPMENT the reason for this whole STUPID THING was that HITLER WAS A GAY PEDOPHILE
When I say that came like a punch to the gut, I cannot overstate how the pure stupidity of it rocked me to my very core. I still haven't been able to get fully into another book for a few weeks, I just can't believe it. I wake up in the night haunted by the words pedo Hitler pictures, pedo Hitler pictures on Everest, secret pedo Hitler pictures hidden on the top of mount Everest
Long story short, if Dan Simmons is reading this I want him to know that I'm living in his walls and he will die by my hand
Review over.
I give this book -1000/10
50% of the book was fine. All he had to do was take out the stupid Nazi stuff and make yetis eat those people and this is what he went with instead, astounding.