Teaser

In the middle of the ocean, there is a mountain. A mountain that has appeared from nowhere. From across the globe come explorers and scientists. But what awaits them on the mountain defies all comprehension . . .

Review

The word ‘Lovecraftian’ is thrown around a lot when discussing horror of the science fictional variety. Sometimes its a deserved label, other times decidedly less so. For a lot of people, and here I lay a great deal of the blame at the feet of Dungeons & Dragons, the word Lovecraftian is a byword for tentacles and crazy people. Bat-wing squids and lizard people lurking below the surface of the Earth. But there’s more to Lovecraft than that. There’s the creeping tension, the fragility of existence, and the constant questioning of nature itself. The idea that stories are first-hand accounts of encounters with forces and beings that are simply wrong.

Ascension, by Nicholas Binge, is a truly Lovecraftian novel. For better and worse.

This is an epistolary novel, taking the form of letters written by a scientist to his niece. One thing that always stands out to me about epistolary novels is that they rare feel like actual letters. The key giveaway that this is fiction is the use of traditional dialogue tags. When writing letters, I don’t know of anyone who reports speech directly. But, these are ultimately novels, and once you get past this break with reality, there are few better formats to fully immerse yourself in the slowly unravelling horror of what comes next.

The first two thirds of Ascension are pure brilliance. I love the editor’s footnotes adding context to the increasingly disturbed chronology of the letters, while the foreword keeps the horror firmly in the realm of the possible. Even as the scientists begin their ascent, it all feels very real. In limiting us to one perspective, with all the uncertainties and unreliability that entails, Binge creates an atmosphere of tense claustrophobia. It’s the classic setup of a team ridden with suspicion, and with their numbers dwindling with every new challenge they face.

Then, because this is Lovecraftian, there are tentacles. This could easily have tipped the book into the absurd, but it’s handled with surprising grace. Though far-fetched, the details are vague enough to be plausible. The inhuman threat is kept largely to the sidelines, lurking in shadows and mist. After all, the most convincing monsters are the ones we do no see.

And then there’s the ending, where everything just sort of falls apart. After a book of chilling possibilities and deep ruminations on the nature of faith, we are rewarded with – what? The great shocking twist that changes everything hinges on the most mind-bogglingly mundane wordplay I’ve ever seen. The climactic choice is either well-foreshadowed or blindingly obvious, depending on how charitable I feel when it pokes itself back into my memory. The most infuriating aspect is that I actually quite like the answers we are given about the mountain, I just think the book is astonishingly clumsy in its delivery of those answers.

But then, Lovecraft was better at ideas than execution, and his stories are still around a century later. The imagery of Ascension will stick with me longer than the sour taste of the denouement. In that, Ascension is a worthy successor to Lovecraft. It’s up to you to decide if that’s a good thing or not.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• Published by Harper Voyager
• First published in 2023
• Cosmic Horror
• 317 pages