Menance: artifact or real?

'All them chimneys. Long way down.'
The menance [sic], I trusted, was imaginary. (Cloud Atlas, pb, p. 150)

Made a note of 'menance', a word which I hadn't encountered before but whose meaning was clear as day.
Can't find it in any reference, offline or online. (Actually, I can find it horribly easily online: there's that well-known film, The Phantom Menance, and the character from the Beano, Dennis the Menance ...)

Don't get me wrong: there is absolutely nothing wrong with a writer coining words, especially ones that are so very credible. It's also possible that it's a typo: there are several in the paperback edition.

But ...

1) Did David Mitchell make it up?
2) Do you think it means, or implies, something that 'menace' does not?
3) Can you think of a good reason why I shouldn't start using it?