In Jenny Kiefer's mesmerizing horror tale, This Wretched Valley, two grad students and two climbers hike into the Kentucky forest to chart an undiscovered rock formation but find a nightmare instead. Six months after they go missing, the discovery of three of their bodies--one an impossibly pristine skeleton and the other two horrifyingly mutilated--creates a media frenzy of speculation and theories. The missing body of the fourth only deepens the mystery.
From this beginning, Kiefer rewinds the story to the moment Clay Foster, a doctoral candidate, assembles a small expedition to study a new rock formation he discovered using LiDAR technology. Along with fellow student Sylvia Burnett (soon to be known as "Sylvia Skeleton"), he invites Dylan Prescott, an up-and-coming rock climber, and her boyfriend, Luke, to ascend the rock. The quartet set up camp in the valley, unaware that it possesses an evil history and a deathless hunger for human blood.
Kiefer weaves these past stories with the group's present to create a daymare landscape of despair. Although Kiefer outlines the end of her characters at the outset, she cleverly makes the means of that end the fulcrum upon which the horror unfolds. The story, which alternates among the perspectives of each character, is a taut descent into madness as the valley refuses to let them go. With nods to The Blair Witch Project and Alma Katsu's The Hunger, Kiefer masters body and survival horror without sacrificing the nuanced notes of psychological disintegration in this impressive debut. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver