Published as 'KL Tower of Terror', though known to me as 'The Weight of Still Air', this novel is about the effort of continuing when motion itself feels compromised.

What begins as a familiar ascent gradually fractures into something less stable, a speculative narrative that slips into collapse as personal strain, social pressure, and existential unease converge.

The story is deliberately disorienting. What reads as a prologue or early buildup is closer to an ending, its moments reordered, its meanings delayed, time folding inward on itself. Suria’s climb becomes both endurance and reckoning, tracing a loop that no longer closes cleanly.

The novel gestures toward a structure that was once circular, where beginnings bled into endings and a life unfolded in reverse, while leaving the disruption visible, as though something essential has been shifted, interrupted, or quietly lost.

Spiritual reflections and Apeirophobia

Underlying the climb is a meditation on determinism, fate, and the limits of human agency. Suria confronts the tension between choice and inevitability, the weight of taboo existential and spiritual questions that shape her decisions. It balances the physical challenge with a philosophical one, while addressing the most human question of all.

Socio-political COMMENTARY

Amid the stairwells and cityscape, the story critiques urbanization, gentrification, and lingering colonial structures, exploring what it means to live under societal pressures and systemic constraints. Anti-capitalist undercurrents, environmental tension, and reflections on post-colonial identity grounds Suria’s personal climb in a larger social context. This is where the author's expereince writing the manuscript in tandem with her dissertation is made apparent (Guilty, oops.). Towers mark the winners of unseen games, while alleys house the cities' ghosts. Suria’s climb exposes how local hierarchies echo global ones: gentrification as economic signaling, heritage lost to capital flows, environmental strain as silent negotiation between profit and survival. A love letter to my beloved city, this novel evolved into an intervention of speculative commentary.

Personification of adhd/add

The AHDH/ADD present is not through Suria’s character, at least not entirely. The book itself becomes a vessel for it. The pacing, the city, the stairwells, and the Towerthon reflect scattered attention, overstimulation, and the relentless need to move forward. Time folds on itself: she’s late to moments that already passed, early to ones that never arrive. Her own impulses betray her; plans unravel like frayed rope. Moments of self-destruction and blind rushes aren’t quirks-- they’re survival strategies, glimpses of a mind running on too little fuel in a world that demands perfection. It’s a world where even Kafka might nod. Every character, location, and plot beat mirrors facets of the ADHD experience.