| Category: | Literary Fiction |
|---|---|
| Author: | Dottie Lee |
| Publisher: | Atmosphere Press |
| Publication Date: | May 19, 2026 |
| Number of Pages: | 228 |
| ISBN-13: | 979-8901741702 |
| ASIN: | B0GTBZTKFS |
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.
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