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Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas
Maybe someday
37
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
8/100Critics
65/100Scholars
Author:
Harley Rustad
Publisher:
Harper
Date:
January 11, 2022
A work of narrative nonfiction centering on the unsolved disappearance of an American backpacker in Indiaâone of at least two dozen tourists who have met a similar fate in the remote and storied Parvati Valley.
What The Reviewers Say
In Harley Rustad’s fascinating new book, Lost in the Valley of Death—arriving just as we’ve climbed the highest perches of our own cuckoo isolation—the portrait that emerges of Shetler as open and free to the world, blown over it like a fresh wind, is compelling indeed. In prose that moves like a clear river, Rustad presents Shetler as that peculiar breed of American peregrinator pushing to the farthest limit, a fearless doer who mixes raw earnestness with extreme ambition to end up in a mess of bad trouble. This is a genre of outdoor story we’ve become accustomed to, as well: the disappeared searcher. But one of the book’s initial achievements is that Rustad reclaims Shetler from that whoa-brah spirituality.
ustad proves himself here to be a masterful storyteller, unfolding character, plot, suspense, pathos, bathos and half a dozen other Greek nouns so meticulously that you’re not going to want to put this book down.
Had we been given this revelatory information at its actual moment in the chronological narrative, Stetler’s story would still have been compelling, but for a different, more profound reason...As the story stands, the reader can only feel somewhat shorted, denied the opportunity to participate more fully with Stetler in his anguished search.
... compelling and personal.
