He's Out There: Book One of the Mt. Baker Bigfoot Chronicles (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798994227442)

When Vikram Vanakar travels to the remote forests outside Glacier, Washington, he isn't looking for adventure. He's looking for his brother. Venu disappeared three weeks ago during a day hike, and the official explanation - a bear attack, no body recovered - doesn't hold together. The map Venu was following was hand-drawn on a bar napkin. The lake it leads to isn't on any public trail. And the man who drew it knows more than he's saying.

What Vikram finds beyond the tree line will cost him everything he thought he knew about the wilderness, about institutional truth, and about what it means to survive something the world isn't prepared to acknowledge.

He's Out There is a character-driven supernatural thriller set in the Pacific Northwest, blending wilderness survival, procedural realism, and slow-burn dread. At its center is an unlikely friendship between a grieving Indian-American software engineer who has never hiked a day in his life and a damaged, secretive outdoorsman who gave the wrong man a map and has been carrying that weight ever since.

For readers of Max Brooks's Devolution and Paul Tremblay's character-driven horror, He's Out There is the first book in the Hidden Lake trilogy - a series that takes the question of what lives in the deep wilderness seriously, and asks what we owe to things we don't yet understand.