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Five years after five women hikers go missing in the Deadswitch Wilderness, a geological expedition sets out to visit its glacier. As their trip gets weirder and weirder, an IT guy with vivid memories of something that never happened finds disturbing messages from the expedition.
I love books about expeditions to weird areas, whether they involve cosmic horror, ghosts, creepy cults, urban legends, space-time warps, mutant biology, sinister corporations, spooky magic, aliens, folk horror, living landscapes, unsettling hallucinations OR ARE THEY, apocalypses, humans driven mad by things beyond human comprehension, and/or found narratives. The Deadswitch Wilderness contains all of above except aliens, and maybe those will show up at some point. It also throws in magic Tarot cards and a haunted video game.
This is everything and the time-displaced kitchen sink, and it's a lot of fun. The characters are thin and the prose is clunky, but if you like this kind of thing, it's very enjoyable. I particularly like the spooky, unreleased video game that one of the hikers was playing before she vanished, the book that was written about them, and the online arguments over the book.
It's a series with at least two books and ends on a cliffhanger. (Part 2 comes out in two weeks; I've pre-ordered it, so you'll get a report.) There's a risk that it may not end up making any sense in the end, and it's hard to imagine her being able to come up with a coherent explanation for everything because there's just so much. But it's an awfully fun ride so far. It has a diverse cast with multiple queer characters. And even if it never has any ending at all, it's still WAY better than This Wretched Valley.
Content notes: One bloody body and one brief instance of body horror, but it's generally way heavier on spooky vibes than on violence or gore. One dead mule. There's a dog which has survived so far and has yet to be endangered, and from the tone of the book in general I think the doggie will be just fine.
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Have you read All The White Spaces by Abby Wilkes? It's a polar expedition book with ghosts, humans being driven mad by things beyond human comprehension, and living landscapes in a cosmic horror sort of way. I keep meaning to tell DW about it, actually.
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