(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Preview copy provided by Angry Robot Books through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. The Way Up is Death publishes 14 January 2025 in UK and 4 March 2025 in Australia.
Reading a book is a rarely a surface-level experience.
While some books do glance off your heart and soul as if they’re made of Teflon, others burrow their way down into the core of who you are and take up residence, while a precious few still, consume and absorb you to such an extent that you aren’t just reading turning pages, but deeply and completely living the journey right along with the characters, your heart in your mouth and your soul on the line as every twist and turn makes it presence viscerally felt.
The Way Up Is Death by Dan Hanks fits without question into the final one of those three categories, a book that demands so much of you, in the very best of ways, that you can’t simply pick it up and read it as if nothing at all is happening to you.
The fact is EVERYTHING is happening to you, sometimes it feels like on every single page, with this utterly immersive mix of fantasy, horror with some deftly-realised sci-fi thrown in for good measure, taking you on a ride that is all-encompassing and soul excoriating – don’t worry, it also builds you right back up, though not completely – and which goes to the very heart, the very heart, of what it means to be human.
[Nia’s heart was pounding so loud she could barely hear herself think, let alone the others talk. All she could discern were sounds that seemed like they might be words, distant and indistinct. The whimpers, though, were louder.
As was the weeping.
What did we just see?
While you will get your fair share of adventuring thrills and spills, and real moments of levity, warmth and emotional intimacy, and they will mean the absolute world to you, The Way Up Is Death is the ultimate long night of the soul, one that doesn’t let up for a second, and which rises and falls on the strength of its robustly-sculptured and empathetically-delivered characters.
The novel centres on a strange, glowing and colourful tower that appears out of nowhere one day over the countryside near Manchester, England, its origins cloaked in mystery and its intent manifestly unclear.
While its arrival does shock the populace of the UK, and indeed the world at first, Hanks rather wryly observes, in one of many on-point and wittily accurate takedowns of the digital culture that is currently subsuming us for better or worse, that everyone quickly adapts, and what was a viral social media sensation almost immediately becomes something else entirely, at once voraciously consumed by the ceaseless appetite of the 24/7 news cycle and then just …ignored as part of the furniture.
It looks for all intents and purposes like the planet simply has another weird thing to add to its list of inexplicable oddities, when all of a sudden, 13 quite disparate people are taken without warning from their everyday life and beamed to the ground surrounding the tower (still high up in the sky mind you so the land on which they stand is vertigo-inducing in and of itself).
A ragtag bunch strangers, among them a flight attendant, social media influencer, game designer, narcissistic children’s book author and teacher/musician, they are all equally uncertain about why they are there, and what the tower wants from them, other than it wants them to “Ascend”, the word emblazoned on its entrance in a way that is both beautifully lit and compulsively threatening.
While they are reluctant to move anywhere until they know what they are dealing with, the tower doesn’t afford them the luxury of deliberation and they set upwards, ever upwards, on a vivaciously terrifying journey through a number of harrowing levels where everything about them is tested, tested and tested again.
It’s not clear where the levels are drawn from, though that does emerge in time and is used to illuminate the characters still further – not all get the full 3D treatment; some like kind, self-sacrificial teacher Alden, game developer Nia and 13-year-old would-be writer Rakie get full service reveals while others are simply there, trope-heavy, to serve a worthy and propelling narrative purpose – but suffice to say, whatever is behind the tests meted out to the 13 strangers, it is designed to go deep into their psyches and souls and reveal exactly who they are.
But far, far more than that is how The Way Up Is Death really shines a light on the parlous state of the human condition, and how the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and the strengths of our virtue and worthiness of our accomplishments or otherwise, don’t always bear true under pressure.
For some of the characters, for many of them in fact, this plays out negatively as it becomes condemningly clear that they are million miles away from their internal narratives, but for others like Alden and Nia, it is revealing in a good way, demonstrating that their flawed and self-condemning internal narratives in no way reflect the laudably high quality of the people they are.
‘It’s a clue to why we’re here,’ Alden said, holding Nia’s gaze. She nodded as he spoke. ‘The tower is challenging us in ways we don’t really understand. We know it’s testing us. Perhaps this is what it’s testing. Seeing how well we measure up — whether we’re good, authentic humans or not. Whether we’re wasting our lives or not.’
Earl’s eyebrows rose. ‘You’re saying this is all a challenge to see how human we are?’
Beyond those individual reality checks of the quality of their humanity, what The Way Up Is Death beautifully demonstrates is the power of community, love and belonging to change the world.
All too often, these concepts are reduced to cheerleading bumper stickers, their meaning all but leached out by vacuous soundbite depictions, but in Hanks’s superlatively good adventure novel, where death and loss are scarily constant companions and survival is not even remotely guaranteed, they are muscular and robust and capable of reshaping worlds and realities.
You cannot walk away from this extraordinarily good novel without having the truth of this seared into you.
Our increasingly individualistic world fumbles and staggers when it comes to elevating the good of the many over that of the one, but in The Way Up Is Death makes it clear in ways intimate and epic but always profoundly emotionally impactful, that we are better when we stand together.
We may not always get the outcome we want, and indeed the lottery of The Way Up Is Death is that nothing, absolutely nothing, is guaranteed, and that any sense of control and influence over our lives is largely illusory – though it’s evident that what we choose to do has a heavy bearing on what happens to us; we are not simply victims of fate – but for life to matter, for our experiences to matter, especially under extreme, death-haunted duress, we need each other in ways than transcend trite meme-heavy messaging.
If you take anything away from this enthrallingly good, terrifyingly intense and emotionally rich novel, let it be that we are far stronger as one, and that when we prioritise community over self, we not only achieve great things, temporary though some maybe, but we transform ourselves in the process, and for however long that lasts, that can be the greatest gift we ever give ourselves and others.