Hugh Glass and Lewis Cole are back on the face of El Capitan, the great rock in Yosemite, where they first shared glory and excitement thirty five years earlier. Now they are seeking refuge from marriages that have disintegrated and trying to rekindle a little bit of that exhilaration of their younger years.

Instead, as they begin their ascent, they find a dead body, a creepy mountain man and another man searching for his missing fiancée. Horrific weather and a raging fire all add to the surreal world that the two men now find themselves immersed in and whether or not they will make it out alive is a truly relevant question.

While the book works on all levels -terrific pacing, sharp plotting, well-drawn characters- the real star of the book is El Capitan, aka The Wall. Long uses his background as a climber to infuse the story with terrific details that absolutely place the reader on the side of the mountain. Details that take the reader inside a particular world can often be suffocating and not particularly interesting to read, but Long does a masterful job of weaving all this with a really outstanding story.

There is a blurb on the back cover of The Wall that reads "A superbly original thriller. Terrifying and exquisite in a single breath." Rarely do statements pasted on the outside of a novel aptly describe what's inside, but in this case, that's about as good a description as you're going to find. Original. Terrifying. Exquisite. All three apply to this outstanding novel.