This was my 75th book of the year, by some counts. I'd previously read and reviewed the author's Dark Matter, and compared it in passing to Dan Simmons' The Terror. This one can also be compared to that, and to Simmons' other gothic horror, The Abominable. Here we have a mountaineering expedition in the long-ago days of the 1930s, with all that entails: the terrible clothes, the ridiculous ideas about food, the racism, the class snobbery, and the ghosts.

Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, With exactness grinds He all. There's an argument to say that Tim Powers should never stray far from his tried-and-true formula of literary hidden histories: famous poets and authors involved in supernatural shenanigans. He's done romantic poets beset by vampires; pre-raphaelites also dealing with the undead; the Brontës beset by werewolves… and now it's all this.