On solid footing

Possessed by Shadows

Donigan Merritt

Other Press

240 pp, $22

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Rock climbing, bouldering and mountaineering anchor this grim novel in which a young climber confronts her impending death and her husband faces losing her.

Molly, 33, a journalist who is dying of brain cancer, and her husband, Tom, a philosophy professor, travel from the familiar climbing routes of Southern California into the High Tatra mountains in what was once Czechoslovakia.

Rather than see yet another specialist in hope of finding a treatment that will help her eke out another few months, Molly wants to spend her last weeks climbing.

Along the way, a lifetime of secrets, including those involving adultery and incest, comes out in a blizzard of plot twists. Then, there are the abductions of climbers by the secret police as well as a treacherous mountain rescue.

Despite the sometimes far-fetched turns, “Possessed by Shadows” is essentially a meditation on dying, but it also presents a surprisingly simple answer to the eternal question: Why climb?

Where danger and tranquillity meet, and every thought but the next move is irrelevant, the strength and security of the rock can be an anesthetic to the cruelest twists of fate.

-- Katharine Mieszkowski