Book Review: This Wretched Valley

Spoilers!

Listen to the dog. Always listen to the dog. That’s my advice to people who find themselves in a horror story (or in any situation). Dogs just know, man. On this Memorial Day weekend, a good old-fashioned ghost story satiated (heh, more on that in a moment) my horror-loving soul, particularly because it took place only two hours from me in Livingston, Kentucky. Jenny Kiefer, a Kentucky native, conjures up perspiring palms, visceral violence, and ghastly ghosts in her debut 2024 book, This Wretched Valley. I thoroughly reveled in this trip to the bloody hell she manifested in the backwoods of rural Kentucky.

Four college friends, Clay, Dylan, Sylvia, and Luke, venture into those woods for a chance at glory, fame, and riches. Clay wants to find a rock nobody has discovered before to ace his dissertation. Dylan is a burgeoning rock climber, recently signed by a brand, who wants to grow her fame and followers on Instagram. Sylvia is along for the ride as the resident botanist and quasi-nurse. And Luke is Dylan’s boyfriend, who helps with rock climbing (he’s the guy at the bottom ensuring she doesn’t plummet to the earth), but who seems more preoccupied with his dog, Slade. Said dog, Slade, is the one who initially alerts everyone to the various red flags about “this wretched valley” they are naively walking into.

I say naively because they ignore all of the following red flags along the way (even if they observe said red flags, they push them aside, trying to rationalize in favor the allure fame and fortune hold):

• Even before they’ve actually left their jeep to venture into the woods, Slade is losing his mind barking at something only he can see. Then, when they actually go into the woods, he’s constantly pulling at the leash or steadfastly planting his paws in the earth, unwilling to go further. He’s growling. Listen to him! Grr, if only.
• Again, even before venturing into the woods, Sylvia looks at a topographical map and doesn’t notice a rock. Clay ignores this, but if there was a rock worth climbing, it would’ve been on the map.
• No sound! When I’m hiking, I prefer the hikes where you can’t hear the road and passing vehicles anymore — that feels like real hiking. But to not hear anything, like the nature your ostensibly immersed within, is alarming.
• Clay’s handy-dandy GPS keeps glitching (and was glitching during the initial flyover, anyhow).
• One of the scariest things about getting lost in the woods, which has happened to me, is everything does start looking the same. It’s a disorienting feeling, which Kiefer expertly taps into with our four characters, who seem to notice this fact, but venture forward toward the rock, nonetheless.
• Sylvia notices the area they’re walking through has an inordinate amount of poisonous plants, and plants that aren’t native to Kentucky. Or the red sap (blood!) and carrion plants she also spots.
• Before all the crap truly hits the fan, Lucas saw a creature of some sort, and Sylvia saw a toenail while peeing, which her botanist brain passed off as a fungi known as dead man’s toes or fingers (which are real and gross, if you dare to Google).
• All of them are having nightmares at night, and seeing “shadow people” lurking around their campsite.
• Once Dylan scales the rock, she reaches a part where she keeps cycling through the same spot, i.e., she think she’s climbing higher only to arrive at the exact same spot again.

I’m not pointing these out as plot holes. Far from it. These red flags are intentional and brilliant for two reasons. First, to show us how utterly absorbed these four characters are in their quest to discover, climb, and publish articles about this rock that they ignore such red flags or rationalize them away (and besides, nobody wants to imagine that they are walking into a ghosts’ lair!). Two, these red flags give us, the reader, repeated feelings of foreboding because we already know, owing to the first chapter, that three of them, at least, are going to die. The first chapter leaves Dylan’s fate more ambiguous for good reason, as she becomes our quintessential “final girl.” And what a great final girl she is because she starts off rather unlikable. That is to say, in her arrogance and callousness at putting climbing the rock ahead of Luke and Slade. Slade goes missing the second morning; we gotta climb the rock! Lucas bangs his head and is severely injured after she slips; we still gotta climb the rock (maybe after we get Lucas to a hospital).

But I, nevertheless, liked her initially because her rock climbing ambitions made me stop reading for a moment to go down the rabbit hole of how freaking cool and incredible it is that people climb rocks for a living (and do indeed receive brand deals out of it via Instagram fame!). Dylan’s climbing is where the perspiring palms comes in. That’s one of my favorite aspects of a good horror story is when the normal activity itself can be horrifying: a.) it’s already dangerous to climb rocks; b.) it would a scary situation to be in the middle of nowhere when a member of your party is severely injured; and c.) because of being in the middle of nowhere, you have no cell service. Add ghosts and an insatiably hungry earth to the mix, and we have ourselves a rollickingly grotesque, adrenaline-filled, intense horror story! Then, Dylan goes through the character arc of becoming someone we are actively rooting for to survive the situation she’s in. It was a bummer that she didn’t ultimately.

But, yeah, that’s what’s going on here. Ghosts and a hungry earth. Kiefer intersperses the telling of this 2019 story with stories from the 1700s, 1800s (Confederate soldiers holding Union soldiers prisoner and then they set them on fire), early 1900s, and 1980s of other wanders in the woods who went missing, were killed and gobbled up by prior ghosts and the earth, and became ghosts themselves. The message being to leave nature alone. This area of Kentucky clearly doesn’t want to be discovered, mapped, published, and carpeted over with tourism. Even the rock itself is a mirage, luring the four into the woods, and then once all the mayhem begins, it disappears, taking our heroin, who fought like hell to survive and escape, Dylan, with it.

I thought for sure when Slade disappeared the second morning, he would be the “lone survivor,” but Kiefer pulls no punches. Slade is killed and eaten by the earth, too! Gah.

Getting lost, period, has terrified me going back to childhood. Getting lost in nature with no discernible way out absolutely still gives me the heebie-jeebies. And now, thanks to Kiefer, I have another blood-soaked, ghostly layer to add to said heebie-jeebies. I can’t wait to see what more she can conjure up, with this being her first book out of the gate!