Adam Nevill’s The Ritual can be an August Derleth Award winner.

It had been the dead thing they found dangling from a tree that changed the trip beyond reputation.

When four older University friends tripped in to the Scandinavian wilderness from the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly get away the problems of their lives and reconnect. However when Luke, the only man still single and living a precarious living, finds he offers little left in keeping along with his well-heeled close friends, tensions rise.

A shortcut meant to ease their hike becomes a nightmare scenario that may cost them their lives. Lost, hungry, and encircled by forest untouched for millennia, points couldn’t possibly get any worse.

But they stumble across an old habitation. Ancient artefacts decorate the walls and you will find bones scattered upon the flooring. The residue of previous rites for something that still is available in the forest. Something responsible for the bestial existence that follows their every stage. So that as the four close friends stagger in direction of salvation, they find out that death doesn’t arrive easy among these historic trees .