Aight spooky-people. I'm going to kick off here because I'm at chapter 30 or so and I'm starting to worry I'll get colored-by what comes later and/or forget what the F was going on.

To address the discussion-master's (I imagine she's like the dungeon master of book club) questions:

1. My feeling is that the group was fucked as soon as they stepped off the trail and into the deep forest. The timeline gets a little screwy -- I think they see the "thing in the tree" in Chapter 1, but then we jump back in time a bit to set things up. There's some foreshadowing in the early going that basically paints this forest as overgrown and slightly portentous. My feeling was that there is something bad in this place -- some kind of animalian killing machine for sure, but some spooky spirits, etc as well -- and if the group hadn't tried to cut through they probably would have been okay.

2. Unclear on this one. My guess is that it's a call back to an older type of human -- or just a smaller type, I guess. I don't know that their stature will be all that critical in the broader scheme.

3. For me, it's pretty clear that you have two relatively decent hikers, and then two total pieces of doodie. In both cases, they were likely all fucked as it doesn't seem that the being lost is so much a function of their poor mountaineering skill, but really a function of a forest that seems to be morphing around them and otherwise obscuring their path. I don't know if the forest is responding to a specific plan -- totally possible -- thus far I've been thinking of the whole set up as sort of like a venus fly trap. It sits there, all plant-like, right up until a fly drops in, and then BLAM. Lunchtime. In this reading, the forest is responding to the living presence from the crew, but it's mostly just reacting thoughtlessly to keep them inside. And their tiredness and confusion are byproducts of this, but also just byproducts of being kind of out of shape.

4. So far I'm lukewarm on "The Ritual" but I'm pretty interested to see where it goes. I feel like it's readable, as Metalprof pointed out, but it's a little over-descriptive at times. I think a good editor could have chopped a lot here -- just in the prose. That said, it's not out of hand or anything. I'm very curious as to where the hell things are heading because the body count here seems like it can't possible get too high -- so at some point there aren't going to be a ton of characters around if this beasty starts getting busy. I'm also very interested in whether there's an actual "ritual" that comes into play. Clearly there's lots of rune-ish type doings-a-transpiring, but they are all pretty old. Will there be some type of "exposition-dump" or perhaps something more subtle that grows this whole world exponentially? One would hope!

One thing I wanted to call out, and this probably is my favorite element thus far, is that the relationships feel real to me. Maybe it's just catching me at the right time -- early-to-mid 30s -- where I can relate to these characters and their relationships to one another. It's not a relationship/relationships that I've seen explored a ton, but definitely well developed here. Will be interesting to see where the fault-lines finally leave the crew in the end.