I really wanted to like this book. The editorial reviews are great. But, unfortunately, for several reasons, it left me feeling kind of empty.

The story begins with the discovery of the bodies of three hikers in the Kentucky wilderness. One is a skeleton, picked clean. Another, identified as Luke, has his eyes gouged out. A third, Clay, has his ribcage folded outward like a set of cabinet doors. The fourth hiker, Dylan, is not found. Only her bloody clothing remains. What happened to these people?

Flash back several months. Clay, a graduate student, recruits Dylan (a professional rock climber on her first gig), Sylvia (a geology student) and Dylan’s boyfriend, Luke (who comes along to belay Dylan) to investigate a granite formation that Clay believes has been untouched since the beginning of time. The four, along with Luke’s dog (Slade), head off into the wilderness on what they think will be a 3-mile hike to the rock. The first signal that something isn’t quite right in this place, comes from the dog, who is reluctant to proceed. Now, this is a ploy that I object to. I don’t know how many horror books/movies I’ve seen where the first sign of malevolence is manifested through the dog. Usually, the dog is killed. In this novel, Dylan, who is quite self-absorbed, neglects to re-zip her tent opening and Slade escapes, never to be seen again until the end of the book.

Camping in the valley, Dylan becomes mesmerized by the rock and attempts, at first, to climb it alone without any equipment, rope, or help. Luckily, she doesn’t kill herself. Sylvia documents everything in little spiral-bound notebooks and observes that the botany of the place is strange and, in some cases, deadly.  Clay dreams of fame – finding a climbing rock no one has ever seen before. Things get difficult when Luke falls from the rock, banging his head (why didn’t he have a helmet?) and breaking his ankle. He’s is bad shape and an attempt by Clay to leave the valley to get help, fails, as, even with his GPS working, he apparently is walking in circles.

I found the characters in this novel to be, for the most part, unsympathetic. Dylan is, as noted, self-absorbed as is Clay. Sylvia is nice, but one-dimensional. You don’t get enough information about her to like or dislike her. Luke is the only sympathetic character, but after he gets hurt, he’s kind of zoned out.

The tension mounts as the characters begin to disintegrate. Clay, impossibly, finds a bottle which seems to contain a never-ending supply of moonshine. This adds to his deterioration. Ghosts of long-dead travelers to the valley appear at the tree-line, watching and waiting.

The novel weaves back and forth between the four protagonists’ predicament and visions of past explorers who dared to enter this valley. But, even with these tales of the past, the author never explains the why of it all, leaving the reader wondering.

The novel progresses rapidly until about two-thirds of the way through, when I found it becoming terribly repetitive. It was, to me, almost as if the author had a word-count in mind and was going to keep writing until she reached it. The novel would have been much better if it had been tightened up quite a bit.

All in all, as a first novel, this is a decent read, but it could have been so much better. Three stars.