The Devil's Valley

by D.M. Shepard

Five friends on a winter fishing trip discover that something bites harder than the Alaskan winter. Evil places earn their names for a reason, and were never meant for humans to trespass. Rose and Ulrik must make a choice—return to the safety of civilization, or save the ones they love. On the heels of their near-death battle with the legendary Tailed-Men at the Headless Ravine, Rose and Ulrik face a new challenge. The dead walk in the icy forest; leaving nightmares in their wake. Voices whisper in the darkness, driving people to question their sanity. Surrounded by monsters in a vast wilderness, the psychological warfare is now worse than the creatures’ obsidian claws and whip-like tails. When a group of their close friends on a winter camping trip are the next targets of the Tailed Men, Rose and Ulrik will risk everything to save them. The answers to defeating the Tailed-Men hide behind the jade grin of an ancient and mysterious golden skull, and time is running out to unlock its secrets and save their friends. It’s a treacherous race against time and darkness to reach the north side of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park to a remote place known The Devil’s Valley The Dark Land is now waging war. The stakes are their lives…and the souls of the ones they hold dear.

383 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 5, 2021

About the author

I pulled up anchor at 18 and joined the Navy to escape a small town in the Mojave desert. Through many twists and turns I made my way north to Alaska. I came for a job, but stayed for the adventure. When I'm not playing with live electricity, I'm out exploring what Alaska has to offer, or hanging out at my off-grid cabin near the tiny community of Chicken with my husband Ray. I blend together my experiences in STEM into my own brand of Suspense, Horror, and Romance.

Reviews

[Eric Lahti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like The Dark Land before it, The Devil’s Valley is a terse thriller. It gives us believable characters stuck in a horrifying situation, but it’s not weighed down by subplots or other malarkey. Think of it as the Ariel Atom of horror stories. Pure, lean, mean, and ready to rip your flesh off. Which, frankly, is how horror stories should be. It fills in some details about the Tailed Men’s motives and expands on their general nasty demeanor while also giving us a bit of backstory about how this isn’t the first time the bastards have crawled out of their caves. The Devil’s Valley also hints at more stories to come and ends on a cliffhanger, so hopefully Shepard is hard at work in Alaska right now figuring out how to get her characters out of the pickle she left them in and also finding bigger pickles to put them back into.

Read the full review on my blog