Synopsis:
Survival and cosmic horror collide in Briardark, the first in the Briardark series, perfect for fans of LOST and House of Leaves.
For Dr. Siena Dupont and her ambitious team, the Alpenglow glacier expedition is a career-defining opportunity. But thirty miles into the desolate Deadswitch Wilderness, they discover a missing hiker dangling from a tree, and their satellite phone fails to call out.
Then the body vanishes without a trace.
The disappearance isn’t the only chilling anomaly. Siena’s map no longer aligns with the trail. The glacier they were supposed to study has inexplicably melted. Strange foliage overruns the mountainside, and a tunnel within a tree hollow lures Siena to a hidden cabin, and a stranger with a sinister message…
Holden Sharpe’s IT job offers little distraction from his wasted potential until he stumbles upon a decommissioned hard drive and an old audio file. Trapped on a mountain, Dr. Siena Dupont recounts an expedition in chaos and the bloody death of a colleague.
Entranced by the mystery, Holden searches for answers to Siena’s fate. But he is unprepared for the truth that will draw him to the outskirts of Deadswitch Wilderness—a place teeming with unfathomable nightmares and impossibilities.
Edition:
E-Arc provided by Net Galley
My Thoughts:
Briardark follows a team of researchers and geomorphologists (please don’t ask me what that is) who enter the Deadswitch wilderness in the Sierra mountain range in an attempt to pick up the research of the principal investigator Dr. Siena Dupont’s late mentor. He was researching some anomalous glacial activity. Except when they get there, there is no glacier. Just water. And from there on out things just get progressively weirder and more sinister. Maps no longer line up. Things (and people) disappear and appear out of thin air.
And then Holden, an OSU (Oregon State University) IT employee is going about his daily business of wiping unneeded data from old drives and re-distributing them when he comes across Siena’s recordings from Deadswitch. He gets pulled into this slowly unraveling and increasingly bizarre mystery. For one thing, the audio files seem to periodically unlock/un-corrupt themselves. Whhhhyyyyyy?!
The moral of this story should probably be: stop hanging out in the creepy woods if you don’t like when creepy stuff happens. Stay inside. Be safe. Read scary books instead.
I promise you’ll have loads of fun tagging along as Holden digs into this weird situation, drawing others in with him as he tries to discover what has, and maybe still is happening in the Deadswitch wilderness.
If you enjoy books that explore themes like found footage, missing persons cases, wilderness survival, disappearing corpses, timey-wimeys, or obscure cult business, I think you’re really going to dig this one.
Rating:
I am really looking forward to the next entry in the Briardark series. This first entry was a wealth of ratcheting tension and mystery that kept me on the edge of my seat (figuratively).
Briardark Briardark #1 By: S.A. Harian Compass and Fern Published: January 16, 2023 ISBN: 9781959500018 Hardcover, Paperback, E-book, Audio 362 Pages Book Website
