You’re free to think whatever you want, but I don’t hold this opinion. That may be why Terror Peak doesn’t really grab me.
The plot is pretty simple. We have an ice-covered mountain called Abominable Peak and an X-treme games snowboarder named Chance who wants to ride it. Chance’s skier granddaddy disappeared on those icy peaks decades before, and now Chance wants to fulfill the old man’s legacy. The only trouble is, the caves of Abominable Peak are home to something big and hairy with red eyes and a taste for human flesh. Thus proceeds a story of icy storms, avalanches, and clawed hands that tear through flesh.
And it would all be pretty bloody exciting (pun DEFINITELY intended) if it weren’t so dull.
For one thing, there are too many characters. Names pop in and out of the narrative, and most of them only exist to add to the body count. The whole setting, the ice-covered monstrous mountain, works well in isolation. It reminded me of The Thing, cold and desolate, a menacing wasteland of stone and snow. And yet the silence is constantly broken by dopey tourists, Chance’s hapless snowboarding team, and even a film crew later on. It breaks the spell and seems totally unnecessary. Many of these folks, even Chance’s friends, fail to be more than a name on the page that’s going to be brutalized by the fearsome creatures that live in the mines under the mountain. I know slashers are supposed to be formulaic, and character development is not the strong point of the grindhouse B movie: but those films, whatever else you might say, are fun. This was a slog, full of characters I didn’t care about in the least dragging their carcasses towards a predictable doom.
The only character who shines is Chance, who serves as the focal point of our icy tale of terror. He is a snowboarder recovering from a bad accident and an addiction to pain meds. He has a lot to prove to himself, and the story weaves in and out around his insecurities and attempts to reassert his manhood. The novel’s inciting incident is our man face planting and getting lost on the slopes of Abominable Mountain, followed by his encounter with one of the mountain’s rather unfriendly residents.
And if that were the whole book, it would be great. I like stories like The Lighthouse and Alien, where isolation is used to create an atmosphere of hopelessness and terror. When characters are cut off from the world, they feel vulnerable, and if you throw a monster into the mix, you have a recipe from some truly chilling stuff. Not so here, though. Chance finds his way back to camp within the first third of the novel, and the rest of it focuses on him and his crew as they team up with a documentarian to try to prove the existence of the Abominable Snowman.
No, I’m not joking. That’s the monster we’re up against, actual abominable snowmen. Abominable Peak, get it? They are fearsome adversaries, I’ll admit, but they never become truly terrifying in my opinion. Chance keeps remarking on their intelligence, but I never saw them do anything that was all that clever. Mostly, they lumber around and break shit, including human spines, for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense. The human encampment that serves as the hub for the last third of the novel has been there for several years: why is it only now that the abominable snow people are attacking? They have the numbers to mess stuff up, as we see towards the end, so why allow humans to settle on their mountain at all? Their motivation is territorial violence, which is fine, but they don’t seem all that consistent with it.
There’s also some mention of them living in the mining tunnels under the mountain and using the tunnels to get around through the heart of Abominable Peak. Boy, those caverns sound like a great place for a climatic battle between Chance and the abominable snow people! To bad it doesn’t happen. And that’s only one of many elements that are introduced, and then seemingly forgotten.
Because folks, the plot really doesn’t make much sense. We have flashbacks to Chance’s grandfather, who tried to brave the slopes with a friend many years before. These flashbacks seem to be leading up to something, but ultimately just serve as backstory and never tie into the plot in any significant way. Chance’s primary motivation is his grandfather’s legacy, but you could remove the flashbacks and the story would essentially be unchanged. In point of fact, I’d rather hear the story of Chance’s grandfather, Jesse, and his frenemy Roland as they brave the mountain peaks in the 1950s. The idea of two men who have a tenuous relationship being forced to work together on an ice-covered mountain as they are stalked by bloodthirsty creatures sounds pretty dang interesting to me.
But instead, we get a story focusing on a group of meat bags who are all going to get gorilla-stomped by Yetis.
Much of the second act is just subplots: a man’s wife is kidnapped and killed by one of the creatures, Chance and crew team up with a film crew to capture the beast in action, all very disjointed. We get more insight into Chance’s grandfather and what occurred on the slopes of the mountain years before, but like I said it doesn’t really seem to matter in the grand scheme of things. It all feels like padding as we gear up for when the yetis finally show up in full.
The climax of the book, in which the human encampment on the side of the mountain is attacked by snow creatures, is probably the most exciting part. Much of it stretches credibility, with Chance fending off giant snow gorillas with a pocketknife, but it’s pulp and I’ll let it slide. Gruesome deaths, fires, and destructions follow, but I still couldn’t get my head around why the yetis had waited so long to try to take out the humans living on their mountain. If they fear encroachment by humans, why not destroy the encampment years ago? People have been using a tiny settlement on the cliffside as a hub for tourism for years, so why now? Did Chance trigger something when he wandered into their caves? Or did I just miss something? It didn’t make sense to me.
The ending is literally a documentary clip show that depicts the aftermath of the book’s climax and is described to us in the barest of prose. By this point, I was just ready to be done.
The prose that carries through this ho-hum affair is pretty standard, with a mix of some genuinely good points interspersed with some real hackwork. The scenes near the beginning where Chance is snowboarding about through the snow are very well done, almost beautifully so. They work really well, and I liked the introspection he experiences in isolation. Too bad this is only a sliver of the actual story, with the rest being populated by dull, contrived conversations and descriptions that tell us the same thing in ten thousand rather uninspiring ways.
And that brings me to the word “like”. I get it: similes are a thing, and this is a pulp story. I know, it’s not Proust. But can we cool it with things being “like” something? Like this, like that, snow like powdered sugar, icicles like fangs, the wind howling like a moaning mother in search of its lost child? Every freaking page has at least one “like” statement, maybe even two or three. It just becomes tiresome, and many of them aren’t even good.
Overall, I think there are some great ideas buried in here. The setting really strikes me as the perfect place for something spooky: cold, isolated, dangerous, and inhabited by man-eating yetis. And yet, the novelette itself is a slog to get through. The plot is extremely erratic, the prose is tone-deaf, and the character are none too interesting. I liked the idea of Chance, a man with a past, getting lost on the mountains and using his wits to survive the cold and the teeth of an abominable pursuer. The scenes where Chance gets introspective while snowboarding gave me hope that there might be something of substance here, buried under the bare bones plot. Unfortunately, this is a minor part of the story, with a big chunk of it dedicated to unnecessary characters, gory deaths that really didn’t manage to shock me, and a plot that can’t seem to decide what exactly it wants to do. Even as pulp, I didn’t find this all that interesting or (worst of all) engaging. Despite the fun premise, it just fell flat and left me cold.