Book review: Lori Lansens’ The Mountain Story loses edge to histrionics

Lansens’ tale of a rite of passage remembered is a ‘ties that bind’ tale of some potency.

The mountain in the title towers over Palm Springs, California. iStock

Written as a confessional letter from a father to his son on the eve of the latter's departure for college, Lori Lansens' The Mountain Story recounts the former's adolescent rite of passage, a life-changing ordeal from 20-odd years ago.

“Five days in the freezing cold without food or water or shelter. You know that part, and you know that I was with three strangers and not everyone survived,” he begins; but there are plenty of details that, until now, he’s left out.

The premise is hypnotically simple, tugging at you from the very first page. Who survived and who didn’t?

Wolf Truly is 18 when he boards the tram that ascends the summit of the mountain for what he’s planned will be his final journey to its peak. He’s lived a life of hard knocks, the most recent of which – his best friend Byrd’s horrific accident, followed shortly thereafter by his father Frankie’s incarceration for vehicular manslaughter – have pushed him over the metaphorical edge as he’s beset by guilt for the (inadvertent) role he played in each. His plan is now to end it all by plunging off a literal one too. Instead though, after a series of freak encounters, he finds himself stranded on a rocky ledge teetering above the ominously named Devil’s Canyon, miles from the nearest trail, without supplies, means of shelter or communication, and in the company of three women, one of whom is seriously injured. Against the odds, his survival instincts kick in.

As the title suggests, this is as much a story about the mountain itself as it is a tale of human endurance, physical and emotional. The craggy summit in question rears up out of the desert above Palm Springs, and has been Wolf’s stomping ground since he and Frankie moved to California when Wolf was 13 years old. Yet from the very first time he saw it – on the front cover of a book when he lived in Michigan – he knew the mountain was his “destiny”.

Alongside the classic juxtaposition between the beauty and bounty of nature, and its perilous potential – “mother of the transverse mountain ranges; hundreds of miles of pristine wilderness; hunting ground of the Agua Caliente band of Native Americans; habitat of big-horn sheep, mountain lions, rattlesnakes; precipitation ten times higher than what falls in the desert below; torrential rains in spring and fall, blizzards in winter” – is Wolf’s own double-sided relationship with the environment: that which once offered him solace from his troubled home life, now threatens to destroy him.

On the one hand, Lansens’ novel is a classic man vs nature struggle for survival narrative, but the power of this is somewhat undercut by a thick seam of sentiment and melodrama. The action takes place over the five days during which the group is stranded, but it’s spliced with forays into Wolf’s past – recollections of his mother; his friendship with Byrd, and the events that led to his accident; and the same for Frankie. It’s a sound structure, but I couldn’t help but wish Lansens had focused her attention solely on Wolf’s relationship with Byrd since it’s the strongest of the strands, not to mention the one that offers the most scope as a convincing backstory if we’re to root for not just Wolf’s survival but his redemption too.

Instead, the misery just kept on coming, trowelled on in ever thicker and more histrionic layers with each trip down memory lane. The scenes in the wilderness were much more successful, the dangers of the environment ever present and increasingly threatening. I had no problem visualising the lonely, barren mountainside; hearing the rustling of nearby bushes in the dark as they huddled together at night fearing coyote or mountain lion attacks; or even gagging slightly at the sight and smell of a festering open wound: this was all brilliantly rendered.

It’s very much a thrills and spills kind of read, the emotional impact pitched more than a little too high to be believable, but it’s a richer “power of love and the ties that bind” story than most.

This book is available on Amazon.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist based in London.