Starred review from April 23, 2018
Fans of the paranormal thrillers of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child will relish this superior debut from screenwriter Rutger, who makes the fantastic seem less so by dint of his self-aware, flawed lead and his ability to inject gallows humor into tense situations. Nolan Moore hosts The Anomaly Files, a YouTube show dedicated to exploring unexplained phenomena, but he and his team hope for bigger things after the Palinhem Foundation—whose mission is truth, according to a foundation representative who goes by the name Feather—sponsors an expedition that could land the show a cable deal. Nolan and his colleagues, accompanied by Feather, travel from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon to attempt to locate a cavern allegedly found by an early-20th-century expedition sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, which later suppressed the expedition’s discovery of “evidence that North America was visited in eldritch times by another culture.” Nolan and gang succeed in finding the cavern, only to encounter incredible—and terrifying—objects that place their lives in jeopardy. Rutger milks every ounce of suspense from his plot. Agent: Jennifer Joel, ICM Partners.
April 15, 2018
An online reality show goes looking for a long-rumored cave in the Grand Canyon, with horrific consequences.Nolan Moore is the host of a show in which he and his crew investigate phenomena and tall tales respectable archaeologists have long since dismissed. For their latest outing, the group is joined by a flaky representative of the foundation underwriting their work (the character's name is actually Feather) and an investigative journalist determined to expose Nolan as a charlatan. Their source is a newspaper account from more than 100 years ago claiming discovery of a cave high up in the walls of the Grand Canyon containing artifacts that suggest a lost civilization. The team has no trouble finding the cave--and anyone who's been to a horror movie in, say, the past 40 years will know that that's only the beginning of their troubles. What follows is a mishmash of Indiana Jones, hoo-hah about the unearthing of long-buried secrets, and the type of horror movies (The Descent and Bone Tomahawk are recent examples) in which a small band of characters are picked off one by one by at-first-unseen adversaries. There are betrayals, feats of sacrificial courage, and survivors who emerge with Secret Knowledge Which Cannot Be Spoken Of. It's mildly engrossing, appropriately icky, very familiar, and wholly ludicrous.Readers will see so much of the action coming that they'll wonder why the characters can't.
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May 15, 2018
Rutger's first novel follows Nolan Moore, an internet personality and rogue archaeologist who hosts The Anomaly Files, a web series on the paranormal. After receiving funding from a mysterious foundation to take the series to network format, Nolan and his crew, along with a journalist and a representative of the foundation, travel to the Grand Canyon to investigate a mysterious lost cavern supposedly found by G. E. Kincaid around the end of the nineteenth century. As they journey deeper into the cavern and uncover more and more mysterious and bizarre artifacts, Nolan and his team are drawn into a dark and sinister plot that reaches back into the depths of human history and threatens to be the end of not only The Anomaly Files but, possibly, their lives. Mixing a brisk and engaging narrative with strongly developed characters, Rutger deftly depicts the claustrophobic depths explored by the endangered expedition. The Anomaly should appeal to fans of The X-Files or Fringe as well as anyone looking for an enjoyable supernatural tale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)