The Hike - Drew Magary

I read Magary's first novel, The Postmortal, several years ago. This is his second novel, and he's actually published a third subsequently. It's still weird to me the guy I remember doing dumb posts about how Rex Grossman was gonna 'unleash the dragon' on the old Kissing Suzy Kolber website became a published author who does pieces for GQ. I feel like this is something I should point to for Alex any time he gets low about how his music career is going.

Ben arrives at a hotel for a conference, and since he's early, he takes a walk in the woods. Then he meets two crazed men wearing the faces of Rottweiler's as masks. Then he can't find his way back to the hotel, or anything he recognizes. All there is, is a path. If he stays on the path, he'll meet challenges, but he also seems to always meet someone or receive something that can get him past it.

If he leaves the path, he'll die. Or so he's told, and the two times he tries it he encounters the masked loonies again, and then a tidal wave, so perhaps understandable he opts to believe it. There are a lot of different settings and creatures, and Magary describes them enough to give you a general idea, but still leave some room to your imagination.

He's also pretty good at making Ben's exhaustion, confusion, and despair come across on the page. Maybe a little too good, honestly. About halfway through, Ben and a crab part ways after the crab gives Ben what I would consider distressing news. At that point, I was honestly surprised Ben didn't simply sit down and call it a day. Just decide he was done following the stupid path, and if something wanted him, then it could come get him.

Of course, Ben just sitting there until he starves to death probably isn't much of a story, unless he wakes up all the way back at the beginning of the path. But based on how overwhelmed Ben is presented as being at times, it got hard to believe he kept wading through everything that was thrown at him.

'"Wolf!"

The wolf stopped, looked at him, and then went back to clawing.

"Can you talk, wolf?" It was a reasonable question at this point. But no, the wolf couldn't talk. It could only kick ass on that door with maximum aggression.'