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.