This wretched valley

I suck at tying knots and I have a fear of heights, so naturally rock climbing - which combines both those things - is one of my least favorite activities. I do enjoy horror novels however, and seeing a bunch of characters doing something I hate and getting punished for it piqued my interest in a sick sort of way.

The first chapter is kind of a grim after-the-fact postmortem, so we know not to expect any victories from the very beginning. I'm still on the fence about whether or not I respect the book setting the expectation up front, or if I would've preferred the illusion of someone making it out of this story alive, only to have my hopes dashed one by one. If nothing else we get an intriguing narrative question in literally the first sentence the serves to pull the reader in.

I wanna say this was a "wrong place, wrong time" story, but really when the setting itself has such a presence in the events that occur it'd be more accurate to say, "wrong place, and there's never a good time to come here". There's such a sinister, evil energy underlining every scene that even though I feel like I've read about campers lost in the woods before, this still managed to feel unique.

It felt like the characters went a little off the deep end too soon for my tastes, and the central gimmick of a professional rock climber protagonist - while it did come up at times - was underutilized. And I felt that the eerie and confusing elements were effective enough at wearing these characters down that we didn't need all of the extraneous blatantly supernatural scare tactics. Parts of this definitely felt like a campy and tropey 80's slasher flick, but I could've easily seen it going a different, more subtle direction.

At the very least, I learned about a real-world climbing equipment company called 'Petzl', and a... very drawn out and graphic death scene that spanned six pages...