The Way Up Is Death by Dan Hanks: Review by Paul Di Filippo
The Way Up Is Death, Dan Hanks (Angry Robot 978-1915202949, trade paperback, 368pp, $18.99) January 2025
Dan Hanks’s third novel (I remain sheepishly ignorant of his first two: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire [2020] and Swashbucklers [2021]) is built around a very familiar concept: the physical, mental, and moral testing, by unknown agents, of a pack of aspirants or seekers or, as in this case, kidnapped human lab rats. This conceit was most widely seen recently in the MCU TV show, Agatha All Along, and goes back at least as far as PKD’s 1957 novel Eye in the Sky. Novels in a similar vein include the Strugatsky Brothers’s Roadside Picnic, Silverberg’s The Man in the Maze, Budrys’s Rogue Moon, Cline’s Ready Player One, and VanderMeer’s Southern Reach books.
But here’s the thing about The Way Up Is Death, proving that no idea in SF is ever exhausted, or cannot benefit from a fresh handling. The book is so vigorous, so suspensefully headlong in its pace, so full of conviction and meaning, with excellently delineated characters, and so essentially unpredictable yet bearing a resonant payoff that any comparisons to those earlier titles begin to seem irrelevant.
Hanks’s book opens thus:
The tower appeared in the skies above the UK on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday afternoon in the middle of May.
A tall, twisting fortress of the purest crimson, atop a floating island, it shimmered in the midst of swirling clouds tinged with blues and purples and pinks that were not of this world.
That it cast a shadow over the town of Hope, nestled in the lush hills of the Peak District, was a fact many would deliberate over later. But, for now, they simply craned their necks and stared up at this illusion, this heavenly painting, thinking it a drone light show or a gigantic advertisement for a new cologne or perhaps marketing for the latest streaming TV show that wouldn’t last beyond a season.
Very neatly, he introduces the Big Not-So-Dumb Object which will be the engine of the book. Next we meet in detail our three main characters (out of thirteen total). Alden, a forlorn schoolteacher and amateur musician; Nia, a stifled graphic designer for various media; and Dirk, an egomaniacal best-selling author of books for kids. The other ten are given snippet introductions. Then, just a few pages in, all thirteen are snatched away, materializing outside the floating tower on an anomalous patch of floating lawn.
Bickering, introductions, theorizing , assertions, and complaints ensue. We get to size up the personalities involved. Then the tower silently bids them ASCEND, and they are forced to enter. One of the posse is killed almost immediately, and the rest realize that their path to the summit is strewn with mortal barriers. As in a video game, each level is different, and it soon becomes clear that the tower is plucking images from their brains and contouring the environment to match. (Hence my reference to the PKD book above.)
Questions now proliferate amid the incessant carnage: is the best tactic friendship, alliances, and cooperation, or every being for himself? Why is this happening? What awaits at the top of the Tower? Hanks shows us vividly the hesitant, faltering reasoning of his protagonists, until, when only a handful of survivors are left, the nature of their mission becomes clear. Nonetheless, the sacrifices don’t stop.
I estimate that we view most of the action through Alden’s POV, although Nia and Dirk get their share of narrative duties. Certainly his backstory and fate become the most resonant. But even the most minor figure receives some good rounding out. And the interactions among such a diverse lot are well done.
What really drives the tale along is Hanks’s inventiveness with the different environments, all limned with many sensory touches, so that the reader feels enmeshed. And also his somewhat lusty and gleeful, quasi-splatterpunk inventiveness with ways to die. Any squeamish readers should be warned that the many deaths in the book are grueling and gruesome. But this is only fitting since one of the lessons the tower is trying to teach involves the place of death in the scheme of things.
Nonetheless:
[X’s] eyes grew wide as she must have felt [the ray] hit her back. The heat burned through her clothes, her skin, her bones. There was a brief moment of realization, of agony, tugging at her lips, pulling them over her teeth in a grimace, as she glowed from within. Dirk wished he’d been looking anywhere else in that moment, but as she looked to him in desperation, their gazes met and he was forced to watch as her face bulged outwards and fire erupted through her skull, chest, stomach, bursting her open and exploding charred pieces of…flesh across the [others].
Every book benefits from a Bad Guy, and Dirk is a splendid example of such. His self-centered disdain for the others and his profanity-laced verbiage stand out in contrast to the attitudes of his mates.
Hanks’s prose is solid and everyday, but not incapable of conveying wisdom: “There was so much about the universe he didn’t know, and the thought that he had been chosen to be a player in this interstellar game awed and humbled him, no matter what awaited.”
And let us close on that rendition of the human condition, applicable whether one is trapped inside a cosmic edifice, or “merely” going about one’s daily prosaic ways.
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