In The Mountain

Dottie Lee’s In the Mountain drops readers into a top-secret facility buried deep inside a mountain. After a catastrophic earthquake, the central Tube collapses, the glass shatters, and floors slide into the abyss, killing most of the staff and leaving a handful of survivors, including Trace, Paul, Pearl, and Joseph, who escape through an emergency exit into the suffocating darkness beyond the Wall. What follows is a struggle for survival as the group, later dubbed the “Dislocated Family,” discovers a subterranean stream, faces pitch-black ruins, and scavenges supplies from locker rooms and broken offices. Along the way, they experience painful losses: driven by despair, Pearl vanishes into the river, and a rockslide kills Paul. Will the remaining survivors be able to find a way out of the darkness and the depths of the chaos within the mountain and into the light?

Dottie Lee’s elegant prose sings through the pages, leavened by the captivating dialogue, which accentuates the sense of terror the characters experience. The narrative is filled with bickering of unvarnished realism, with characters who are authentic in their fears, despair, and struggle to accept and face a reality that challenges them in unimaginable ways. The pacing of this book starts slowly with the banal rhythms of life in an office in chapter one, then quickens with the horror of the collapse before transitioning to the tense, suspenseful, yet deliberate cadence of crisis. The pathos grips you by the cuffs and hardly loosens, and it grows with well-written, focused scenes like Paul’s tragic death, Trace’s near-fatal fall, and the gunpoint confrontation with Tony. The claustrophobic nature of the setting creates the sense of dread that permeates the story, from the five-level facility, the zigzagging metal stairs, and the Tube, to the endless rubble of the Wall. This setting is imagined and executed to give a feel of something physically dangerous and psychologically oppressive. In the Mountain ticks all the boxes of a well-crafted thriller with a tangled plot and characters that stay with you after you turn the last page.