The Hike, by Drew Magary

[rachelmanija]

Ben is on a work trip, away from his wife and three young children, when he decides to take a hike through the woods by his hotel. Ben sees a man with a Rottweiler face disposing of a corpse, and flees into the woods with the dog man pursuing him.

The next thing he knows, he's trapped in a surreal world halfway between a nightmare and a video game. It often involves distorted reflections of his own past - Ben has a scar on his face from a Rottweiler bite and he keeps getting attacked by Rottweiler-faced men, an old lover appears at the age she was when he last saw her, and he befriends a talking crab that knows a suspicious amount about him. He has to stay on the path, or he'll die. A mysterious old woman gives him tasks and tells him the only way he can get home is to find the Producer. Things appear and disappear in a very dreamlike manner, the scene shifting from a cannibal giant's castle to a hovercraft to a desert. After each ordeal, he gets a banquet with champagne.

This extremely weird book is a bit like a dreamlike, horror-inflected Alice in Wonderland for bros. I almost gave up on it halfway through - it was so "one random thing after another and the whole thing is clearly not real" that I got bored - but that's when something happened that intrigued me enough to continue. It doesn't need to be as long as it is - it's a short book that would have been better as a novelette - but the ending, while not explaining all that much, still manages to be satisfying.

I wouldn't re-read this - the actual reading experience often felt like a slog - but it was definitely different and had some good twists, so I'm not sorry I read it. I suspect there's some overlap in readership between this and Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Don't read the spoilers if there's any chance you'll actually read the book.



Ben meets up with a talking crab who accompanies him. At the halfway mark, they come to a fork in the path, and the crab says he has to take a different fork than Ben because...

...he's Ben from the future, having been trapped there for years and years! Ben will eventually get turned into a crab and meet his younger self!

That interested me enough to continue reading. Ben gets enslaved for years, builds a castle from scratch, meets a conquistador who's also been trapped there, defeats a whole bunch of D&D type monsters, gets turned into a crab, and meets his younger self. We get lots of flashbacks to his pretty ordinary life - his wife is a nurse who was seriously traumatized on the job by an event she can't discuss, the Rottweiler incident happened when he was thirteen and drunk, his father was an abusive asshole, he really loves his kids but the author fails to give them actual personalities, etc.

Ben (now human again) realizes that he can control his experience if he sincerely believes that he is the Producer! But there is an Executive Producer, who tells him that many people have come through this experience, and Ben can now choose either paradise or going back to his own life at the moment the whole thing began, but if he ever tells anyone what happened, he'll die instantly. (No, there is no explanation of why any of this.) Bear tears himself in half, creating Old Ben and Younger Ben. Old Ben goes to Paradise, and Younger Ben - the age he was when this all started - goes back home.

Back with his family, Ben is still shellshocked. And then! He realizes that the incident with his wife, that he thought was job-related trauma, was actually her having the same experience! He and his wife look at each other, and realize that though they can never discuss it, they both know.

The very ending was moving - I loved the reveal with his wife. The rest of it had the bones of a very cool story, but it needed better prose, less "and then this! and then this!" and for the relationship between Ben's past and the stuff happening now to have some kind of meaning, rather than just "this weird thing is similar to something in Ben's real life." I also disliked that the way you win is to figure out that you can control reality if you believe that you can. (I didn't like it in The Matrix either.)



Probably it's all a metaphor for life.

Content notes: Horror-typical gore and gross-outs.