A group of rock climbers meets a grisly fate in Kiefer’s survival horror debut, This Wretched Valley (Quirk, Jan.).

What inspired this book?

It was inspired by the Dyatlov Pass incident. In 1950s Russia, these very experienced hikers went up into this mountain pass in the winter and disappeared. Then in the spring, when all the snow was melting, their bodies were found in this really strange scene. Nobody knows what happened to them. There’s lots of speculation about it, ranging from monsters and aliens to more realistic things. I think the current theory is that it was an avalanche. Every article about the incident starts with “this is how their bodies were found.”

I think one was missing their tongue. There were a couple of people who were naked. The tents had been cut open from the inside. From there, articles will fill in the context of what the hikers were doing and why they were there. So that definitely inspired the structure of the book, where the first chapter opens with investigators finding three bodies in all these weird ways seven months after their disappearance.

Before their deaths, the protagonists set out to find undiscovered rock formations. Why the focus on rock climbing?

I’ve been climbing for, I think, over 10 years now. It’s my favorite form of exercise. I had a friend named Andrew and we would occasionally take trips to Red River Gorge, which is one of the biggest and most well-known rock climbing spots in the world. I think it was on one of those trips—I don’t remember what sparked the conversation—but we were just talking, and he was saying, “I wonder if there are any other rock formations in those trees over there that nobody’s found because it’s just sort of wilderness.” Then he said he had the idea to use LIDAR to fly over regions and use the scans to see if there were any rock formations. And I asked him, “Can I use this in a book?”

You’ve spoken about channeling your anxiety into your writing. Can you say more about that?

I think I lean toward horror, not just because I enjoy spooky things, but specifically because it helps me control my anxiety in some ways.
If I’m having intrusive thoughts, a lot of time I can take away some of the fear that comes with that by asking, “Okay, what if I put this into a story? How could I control the outcome?” In a way, it makes my anxiety useful. I think it also helps, because when you’re writing a character in a horror novel, it’s useful to know firsthand what it might physically feel like. When I’m anxious, I usually get really tight in the chest and have racing thoughts, and sometimes my heartbeat can speed up. So I’ve used those physical sensations in my horror writing. It’s a really helpful exercise to think, “What if this was fiction?”