I usually don’t read books like The Silent Land, which fits squarely into the pop-fiction category. I found it through a Facebook ad that claimed it’s like a Murakami novel. I was, of course, skeptical, but I downloaded it to my (new!) Kindle and gave it a try. It’s was really short: I read it in four or five hours, and I read pretty slowly. It’s about a couple skiing in Spain when they get caught by an avalanche. The husband digs out the wife, and they get down the mountain, but no one is there. The whole town is empty. At first, they think that the resort has been evacuated for fear of another avalanche, so they try to get out of town, but no matter what road they take, the always end up back there. The reader wonders if they’re dead, which seems kind of obvious if you’ve ever seen Beetlejuice, or if something else is going on. The power starts going out, and time gets confused. In the end, it turns out that only one of them is dead, which is a bit of a twist, I guess.
Though The Silent Land is a predictable pop-fiction thriller, I really liked it. Graham Joyce‘s imagery is really good: it was one of those novels in which I found myself totally absorbed. I was even creeped out at times. I wanted to find out what was going on as much as the characters did, so I found myself reading through it really quickly just to find out what would happen next. It’s totally worth a read.
