This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer
I admit, this book's striking cover featuring an ominous cliff face in the image of a skull was enough to draw me in, but then I stuck it on my bookshelf for an inordinately long period of time before eventually snagging a download on my Kobo, where I then plowed through it. While I was not as engaged as I was with some other recent reads, Jenny Kiefer is a pretty good author, and has a firm sense of how to move the story along, so while the book is fairly slow and methodical for the first half, somewhere around the 60% mark it picks up the pace and ends on a rather suitably gruesome note.
The tale spins around four professional climbers/social media stars (two couples and their dog) who use a flyover in a remote wilderness area to find undiscovered scalable cliffs that they can add to their repertoire of potential excursions. A glitchy read on lidar scans reveals what appears to be the motherlode: an amazing looking cliff face in the remote wilderness that no one knows about. Never mind that the readings seem a bit....glitchy? They plan an expedition and head on off. The team starts of excited, though a visit to a local small town diner leaves them with the by now traditional warning from the local folk (waitress, in this case) that things aren't necessarily all right out in the area they are heading to....
The prologue has already forecast that disaster awaits, so the reader knows that it is clear everyone on this expedition is likely doomed. Perhaps the main problem with the story ends up being this expectation, mixed with a rather slow build on the threat as for a good half of the novel the problems are focused on the subtle stuff, such as the group noticing that they can't seem to backtrack, or how their GPS readings don't seem to be adding up. It slowly moves into a more "city folk under threat by a palpable evil wilderness" trope but then we start to get hints of the backstory...ghosts of the past, things that have happened to those who came here before the climbers. At some point the book finally moves forward as the hikers begin to experience injury and eventually madness, and then things get crazy as they begin to experience what are debatably either hallucinations or actual ghosts. By the end of the book it is quite obvious that the supernatural nature of the evil and malign presence which occupies the very soil of the region is palpable, and the fates of all are sealed.
This book relies on a fairly traditional set of tropes, including the "scary woods will get you," thematic, the idea of a haunted area which is not so much a threat due to ghosts but rather a malign sentience itself, and like many more conventional horror novels less effort is made to explore the nature of the supernatural as presented in the novel than to ultimately accept that it simply exists, and it is evil and out to get you. As a result the book plays out fairly conventionally, and while I enjoyed reading it, I do wish it had a few surprises. Indeed (spoiler) the biggest surprise was also a tiny happy one: the dog is the sole survivor.
Reading this not long after Clark's The Tower left me drawing comparisons between the two. I think Kiefer's novel is actually a bit stronger in that it feels like she worked out the plot and pacing rather well, so I didn't ever feel like she had changed the rules of the threat or deviated from the planned story to follow a lead.....the story goes exactly where it intended to. This both works in its favor and against it, as I would not at all have minded a bit more exploration of the nature of the haunted wilderness, even maybe a glimpse as to the true nature of the evil. The characters of the story are not, unfortunately the sorts of people to do that kind of investigation; they are ordinary people facing unsurvivable circumstances, and only get the barest opportunity to question what is happening to them. Late in the story, for example, they have a moment where one of the characters (Dylan) uses her camera phone to try recording the supernatural manifestations she is witnessing, and realizes that the camera is not showing her any of it....she begins to suspect then that something is making them see things, but too late to really save anyone.
Overall, a fun read, you may enjoy it a lot if you like "supernatural nature is out to kill you" type stories, but I think I wish the four main characters had been a bit more relatable, and there are chunks of the book I feel dragged on a bit before interesting things started happening that were a bit too slow for the sort of story this was telling. A fat novella stretched to book length. I give it a C+.
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