By Nicholas Binge

Finished 3/15/25

This one started incredibly strong for me—probably for about two-thirds of the book—before the ending lost a bit of its magic.

The story is framed around a man who was believed dead but has somehow turned up in a mental hospital. With him is a briefcase full of letters describing the expedition he went on, and the book unfolds through those accounts. The letters detail an unbelievable journey to a massive mountain range that suddenly appears in the middle of the ocean—bigger than anything humanity has ever seen.

From there, the story becomes about the climb itself. But it’s not just a physical ascent. It slowly turns into something much stranger and more psychological. The higher they go, the more reality seems to bend. Time doesn’t behave the way it should, people begin to lose their grip on what’s real, and the environment itself feels like it’s operating on rules humans don’t fully understand.

One of the coolest parts of the book is how it explains higher dimensions. There’s a great analogy about an ant moving across a table—it can only understand forward and backward across the surface. If something existed above that plane, the ant wouldn’t be able to perceive it. The idea is that humans might be in a similar position when it comes to a fourth dimension. The book plays with that concept in a really fun way, imagining folds or pathways that move through time and space in ways we can’t normally experience.

For most of the book, that mystery is what keeps it so compelling. Strange things start happening during the climb—visions, overlapping moments in time, encounters that don’t quite make sense—and you’re constantly trying to piece together what’s actually going on. It has that great creeping sense of unease where the environment itself feels almost alive.

Where the book stumbled for me was the final stretch. After so much buildup and such a fascinating mystery, the explanation didn’t feel quite as satisfying as the journey getting there. It’s not terrible—it just felt like the story shifted away from the eerie, mind-bending tone that made the earlier parts so gripping.

Still, the atmosphere and ideas carry the book a long way. The concept alone is strong enough that I kept thinking about it afterward, especially the way it plays with perception, time, and how limited our understanding of reality might actually be.

7.5/10 — mostly because the ending was fairly weak, but the concept and majority of the book were enjoyable.