Overall, while this book had its stronger moments, I found it a little disappointing and felt that it didn't maintain the mystery of its premise enough to really leave me thinking or wondering about it at all. Both the characters and the atmosphere felt a little underdeveloped, and the events of the text themselves felt a bit repetitive after awhile. I still enjoyed the premise itself and some of the gory bits, but I left the book feeling a little frustrated about the direction it went.

To start with positives, I did enjoy the incorporation of rock-climbing into this book, as I have a tiny bit of experience with it myself. Kiefer's writing absolutely shines in the scenes where Dylan is climbing, with thrilling descriptions, adrenaline, and clear stakes on what happens if she falls. Another bit I enjoyed is some of the descriptions of the more gory scenes, especially the opening chapter. I thought beginning with an outside description of the main characters' mutilated bodies worked really well as a hook, creating mystery around how they wound up like this and a sense of doom over the entire journey. There were also aspects of the setting that I really enjoyed, especially as things got more and more supernatural.

Still, there were several things that kept me from really enjoying this book. To start non-spoilery, I just felt like the characters were very shallow, especially Luke and Clay. Even though the author kept stating their goals over and over, they didn't feel like real people with real lives and aspirations that were cut off early, and that made it hard to spend so much time with them throughout the book. I was only vaguely rooting for Dylan at the end, especially because of the beginning. I also felt like, especially past the halfway point, there was just a lot of repetition in description and plot events. Literally all four main characters trip on a root while running in the woods at LEAST once, and that just gets boring after awhile! In terms of the writing itself, it was absolutely serviceable and again really shone through in some places, but there were plenty of others where I felt like the sort of quirky, very metaphor-heavy style could've been toned down to make the scary scenes feel more serious and impactful. For something that's just a tiny bit spoilery but is also introduced very early on, the horror of this book is less of survival horror and instead shifts to a sense that the landscape itself is hungry and actively luring in the characters, which can be very hit or miss depending on what you want from the book. Personally, I actually really love sentient, malicious landscapes and was excited to see that element introduced! However, the way this element was actually handled was really disappointing to me.

Having this literally hostile place that hungers for blood and then just doing pioneer ghosts instead is SO disappointing to me personally!!!! Instead of using weird and mysterious aspects of the landscape, the nature, the rock itself, it's just ghosts, and you can get ghosts anywhere!!! This was just such a personal letdown and I felt like it was the least interesting thing to do with this particular premise. The kills that weren't achieved via ghosts were just "guy gets manipulated by the landscape, goes crazy, and chases woman through the woods until she trips on a vine" with two separate guys, which again felt repetitive and uninteresting. This descent into madness wasn't slow or compelling enough for me to especially buy it, either. I also felt like the use of ghosts and over-description towards the end of the book really killed the central mystery for me--the opening chapter did make me want to find out what happened, sure, but I also felt like a lot of the good horror of this setup is actually in not knowing all the details. In particular, having Dylan's death seem mysterious for a couple of pages, and even hinting that her Livestream continue, creates a fantastic sense of mystery! Except, whoops, it's confirmed that she's dead and rotting beneath the landscape, which is just, again, way less interesting. This might sound really harsh, and admittedly I think some of my disappointment with this book is on me and my preferences towards leaving things unexplained as well as hostile landscapes, but overall I just didn't get the tension, adrenaline, and mystery from this book that I wanted, and I felt really frustrated by the end.

Overall, This Wretched Valley was a bit of a letdown for me, and I just wasn't as invested and scared as I really, really wanted to be. There were absolutely some strong moments, and I feel like Jenny Kiefer is absolutely a strong writer who came up with a really interesting premise, and I would be interested in picking up her work in the future even if this book wasn't a hit for me. It just didn't deliver on the sort of horror I really enjoy and didn't have the depth