Short Story Review: “The Walk Up Nameless Ridge” by Hugh Howey

“The Walk up Nameless Ridge,” a Kindle Single by Hugh Howey

Amazon Kindle: $.99 – 18 pages
Audible: $.99 (Narrated by Jonathan Davis) – 39 minutes; Whispersync Ready

Story Description: On planet Eno, there stands a mountain that has never been summited. Many have tried. All have failed.

This climbing season finds three teams making their bid up this murderous peak. And one man among them will discover these ugly truths: There are fates worse than death. There are fates worse than obscurity. To be remembered forever can be its own curse.

Review:

While this story is strong on its surface, exploring a far future hobby of climbing mountains on planets where mountains are as high as orbit is from Earth, the real meat of Hugh’s story is in the metaphor between mountain climbing and the pursuit of personal ambition. At $.99, I give my strongest guarantee that this story is worth your time if the above sentence sounds at all interesting or applicable to your life. Anyone who struggles with the cost of ambition on your happiness and loved ones should really check this story out.

I separate this intro from my review because you might not want to know the context of the writer’s background and how I use that to interpret this story. Read on anticipating this background influencing your interpretation of the story’s metaphor.

Hugh Howey is one of my writing heroes, having endured low sales through around six books before his novelette, Wool – Part One, took off into a five part omnibus, WOOL, which has sold movie rights, a seven figure deal with Simon and Schuster (for Print only!) and various other accolades that have yet to ruin his awesome and humble personality. I’ve read all of his Silo Saga (WOOL, SHIFT, and DUST) and his stand alone, I, ZOMBIE. To pick one quality that I love most about his writing is how he packs emotion into his characters in their struggle to survive, find happiness, and how those pursuits often separate them from their loved ones.

In spite of this common theme to his stories, Hugh manages to make each one feel like a new experience. In “The Walk Up Nameless Ridge,” Hugh surprises with his possible accuracy on what it would be like to mountain climb (even though he never has). This professionalism to the craft creates a strong connection to the character in his setting (I say “his” but since the character is nameless, I don’t remember if the gender is described, so forgive my assumption).

Having read and listened to this story, I appreciate both experiences. The narrator, Jonathan Davis, does a fine job, and for whatever reason, the ending was more powerful having heard it.

The emotions involved follow the main character slowly realizing the cost of his ambition. Mountain climbing illustrates how ambition costs more the higher you “climb,” where it’s not enough to be higher than others, and where care of family would have made you stop long before.

The character reflects: “I was already dreaming not just of being a legend, but of the awesome humility I would display in being so.”

This made me laugh, and yet it’s so true to what we think about when we justify the selfish pursuit of our ambition. In my recent interview with Kay Kenyon, we talked about inner peace and the writing career, and she asked the rhetorical question of whether she enjoys the act of writing most, or if it’s all about ego. This answer is so ambiguous that we often fall prey to not realizing the cost of ambition becoming about ego until the damage to our family has already happened.

The main character asks: “Do you try to be the highest man in the universe?”

This story’s strength is examining that pursuit and the costs therein. I won’t spoil anything about the outcome, but the ending is so worth your time to reach.

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Timothy C. Ward
Executive Producer

Timothy C. Ward‘s first publication, Cornhusker: Demon Gene (A Short Story), is available on Kindle for $.99. He is looking for beta readers for his novel, Kaimerus, described as “Firefly crashes on Avatar and wakes up 28 Days Later.”

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