New Arrival: This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer

 

If there’s one thing working against the tourism board of any state park in America, or any place that has hiking trails to hike or rock walls to climb, it’s horror. Go out into the woods, according to most horror plots, and never come back. The woods are full of monsters, ghosts, and in some cases, the forest itself wants to eat you. However, I’d be remiss in saying the nature-is-dangerous trope belongs only to horror, since movies like Alive and 127 Hours show the dangers that exist away from paved roads and Internet signals. Nature is dangerous according to multiple genres, but author Jenny Kiefer manages to pull from all these different genres depicting the deadliness of the natural world in her stunning debut This Wretched Valley.

Four young people journey out into the forest near Livingston, Kentucky. There’s Dylan, a rock climber who’s looking to have her name immortalized, her steadfast boyfriend Luke, geology student Clay, who is also looking to find his own version of the brass ring, and Clay’s research assistant Sylvia. Clay just discovered a rock wall that could make Dylan’s name legendary if she climbs it and have climbers of all kinds pay Clay all kinds of money for their chance to climb it. This land represents a holy grail for Dylan and Clay, but there is also something haunting this land. Whatever lives within the ground has been killing ever since humans have set foot on its earth, and it looks to make the four its next victims.

Fans of wilderness horror will definitely get some Blair Witch vibes, particularly in its in medias res/true crime approach to storytelling, but much of this movie owes its structure to survival movies. Not only is something in the woods out to get these four, but injuries start piling up and food becomes scarce, creating a perfect storm in which these four will all make terrible and potentially fatal decisions. Fans of both supernatural horror and survival horror will love how Kiefer creates a satisfying stew of spooky shenanigans and frayed nerves. Overall, this debut is a spectacularly terrifying haunted house story that doesn’t even take place in a building.

 

Have You Read This? I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House by Ben Farthing

 

One of my favorite things about horror is how, no matter how far out there the premise is, one is still able to tell an emotionally resonant story. Add vampires, add vampire musicians, or add vampire hunting musicians hunting vampire musicians; readers of horror can afford to have their suspension of disbelief stretched to its limit if they feel the emotions being portrayed are authentic. One such example of this is the writings of Ben Farthing. My wife had recently purchased two of his books for me as a Christmas present. While I liked the nutty nostalgia-laced horror in I Found Puppets Living in My Apartment Walls, my mind comes back more often to his more emotionally relevant I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House.

The book is a quick read but it packs quite the emotional punch, despite its seemingly light premise. Proud dad Dave is hiking in the woods behind his house with his four-year-old son Jacob when both father and son make a fascinating discovery: somehow, a circus tent has appeared on Dave’s property. Dave at first doesn’t know what to do about such an oddity near his home and Jacob seemingly doesn’t want anything to do with the house, but all it takes for the two to become prisoners of the tent is to approach it. What began as a mere curiosity for Dave becomes a fight to escape a tent that seems to swell beyond the size of most tents, as though it somehow exists outside the boundaries of time and space.

Once father and son are trapped inside the tent, all sorts of seemingly impossible occurrences and monstrosities try to keep them from leaving. Dave is not only struggling to find a way out but he is trying to keep Jacob relatively calm and not have him break down in a way that would impede their escape. Much of the emotional weight of this story is in Dave questioning his own fitness as a parent and the end of the book provides a surprising knife in the gut for both Dave and the readers who, like Dave, wonder if they are really a good parent. How the book ends won’t give readers a sense of relief as it gives them a chance to say, “At least I’m not Dave.”

Graphic Content: Love Everlasting Volume 2 written by Tom King and illustrated by Elsa Charettier

 

People might be familiar with the book Love Everlasting, Vol. 1, written by Tom King and illustrated by Elsa Charretier (I also hope that it’s because you read the review I did for volume 1). It focuses on Joan Peterson, a woman who finds herself living out the plotlines of several romantic stories, being everything from a maid pining for her employer to a secretary who desires her best friend’s fiancée. In all these scenarios, once she supposedly finds love, she is whisked away Quantum-Leap-style to a new romance plot, and if she doesn’t fall in line and live out the story she’s in, a mysterious cowboy shows up to kill her and she respawns into a different romance plot. I was unsure how Volume 2 of Love Everlasting could add anything new to the story. It doesn’t add any details to Joan’s predicament, but it does show a wrinkle to the rules of her existence.

The scenario of Joan needing to find love to escape must still play out for her in Volume 2, even if finding that love takes a while. (Here’s where I should probably put a SPOILER ALERT for those who want to read the story and be totally surprised). In 1963, party girl Joan finds herself in a relationship with square-jawed, strait-laced Don, but Joan actually goes through an entire life with Don, from getting married and having kids to becoming a grandmother and spending her old age alone. Though Charretier’s artwork still pays homage to silver age romance comics, King’s story here is quite a change from the last volume where Joan is constantly trying to find her footing in a new universe. In this, she is trying to figure out if this world she finds herself in is real, especially now that she has created beings she should love unconditionally.

One could almost see this stop on Joan’s journey as a glimmer of hope, even if it’s a false one. Even as she starts to look at the flaws of this world, she still can’t help but want to stay because of the life she’s created here not necessarily with Don but with her children and grandchildren. Volume one apparently sets up the premise of this universe while volume 2 offers a story of what happens to Joan when her escape hatch no longer works, seemingly arguing that it’s crueler to allow Joan to have hope, even if it’s a false hope, that she can remain indefinitely in wherever she lands.