This Wretched Valley

Four people and a dog hike into a remote stretch of Kentucky wilderness in search of an unmapped rock face: Clay, a geology grad student chasing a career-making LIDAR discovery; Dylan, a newly signed professional climber hungry to make the first ascent; her partner Luke; and Clay's research assistant, Sylvia. What they find is a place the locals know to avoid, where time seems to fold back on itself, events repeat against the evidence of their own cameras, and the forest begins to unmake them.

Inspired by the real-life horror of the Dyatlov Pass incident, Jenny Kiefer's This Wretched Valley is a bleak, escalating wilderness-horror debut of body horror and madness, where a scientific expedition becomes a slow, grotesque descent and the bodies are found—eventually—arranged in ways that defy explanation.