The Hike – A Suburban Dad’s Psychedelic and Darkly Humorous Journey

“There comes a point in life when you’ve seen so much that hardly anything surprises you or bothers you, and that’s a shitty moment. Wisdom is so terribly overrated.”

Drew Margary’s genre-bending novel The Hike (published August 2016) is the kind of fun read I’d like to dabble with after going through weeks of heavy and deep literary fiction. This crazily entertaining novel opens with a man named Ben, a regular family guy (a wife and three kids), going on a hike to shake off the tedium of his hotel atmosphere, while taking up a business trip near the picturesque Pennsylvania countryside. What was supposed to be a leisure walk soon turns into a nightmare as Ben is caught in a loopy, unwinding path. Reluctantly taking up the advice to never veer off the well-marked ‘Path’, the bewildered Ben’s surreal journey brings him face-to-face with homicidal maniacs wearing dog-faces, talking crab, a giantess snacking on human flesh, and other odd nightmarish creatures. Styled like a fantasy role-play or video games, the path leads Ben to terrifying mini-adventures, while the eventual quest is to meet ‘The Producer’. Scattered throughout Ben’s fever dream of a mission are the brief trips down the memory lane, parceling out information about this middle-aged dad’s past.

The strength of The Hike is that it couldn’t pigeon-holed into a particular genre. Hence the utterly unpredictable and vividly imaginative craziness Drew conjures keeps us on our toes. It’s a part horror, I mean who couldn’t feel for a dad grappling with the prospect of never seeing his lovely family again.  It’s a dark campfire folktale, filled with compendium of eerie, magical creatures. It’s a love letter to fans of old video-games. Then there’s a snarky, sentient crab and a domineering yet endearing giantess named Fermona bestowing healthy dose of humor to the proceedings. Amidst all this The Hike also deals with thoughtful themes and meaningful life lessons, largely questioning humans’ control over shaping up his/her own destiny. Eventually, I liked the novel’s ‘what-the-heck?’ kind of twists.

Drew Margary, a popular columnist for Deadspin and correspondent for publications such as GQ (I went through some of his hilarious and engaging columns after reading the novel), in interviews has remarked that this bizarre tale has some autobiographical elements. Ben’s insights about marriage and parenting are pretty much taken from Drew’s life experience (like Ben he is married with three kids). The touch of loneliness Ben wants to escape during the business travel is also something drawn from Margary’s personal feelings. The author has cleverly and imaginatively amplified the nightmares he might have had during those lonely business trips (a mix of grotesque body horror and traditional fairy-tale creatures). Of course, it’s not an easy task. Despite unfolding the tale in series of weird vignettes, Margary deftly balances between delivering the emotional punch and sumptuously detailing the madcap adventures.

From Lewis Caroll, Tolkien, Dante to C.S. Lewis and Twilight Zone, the sources of inspiration are obvious (furthermore Margary cites Ruth Manning-Sanders’ short fictions/compilation of worlds with make-believe beasts as a chief influence). Yet the author’s energetic style of writing, punctuated with crunchy descriptions and undercurrents of emotional honesty gives off a distinct sheen. There are also some problems with the episodic nature of writing since at some point the surreality beings to dominate the emotionality. We know that, however harrowing and insane the situation is, Ben would somehow emerge unscathed and move on to the next one. Particularly towards the later-half (the episodes chronicling the face-off with Voris and the stretch accounting crab’s life), I began to wonder where it’s all gonna lead. It’s a rather niggling issue, which I felt was overturned by the intriguing ending. The metaphor of ‘Path’ is very obvious from the start, yet the timeless themes discussed here (family life, parental fears, ageing, etc) takes the novel beyond the genre trappings of fantasy/horror. Overall, The Hike takes us on a fascinating gonzo adventure that’s nerve-wracking as well as heart-felt.

 

Educated: A Memoir – An Uplifting Book on the Transformative Power of Knowledge and Learning

“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she should have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.”

Memoir writing not only helps to reconcile with the distressful past, but also can help with healing long-term emotional/psychological problems by raking up the truth which we had involuntarily hidden from ourselves. In this vein, the much-heralded memoir from Tara Westover ‘Educated’ (published February 2018) bowls us over not just because of the author’s inspiring life-journey or due to the strange child upbringing detailed in the book that’s far removed from our unproblematic and considerably affluent formative years. What particularly captivated me about Tara Westover’s keenly observant voice is the knack with which she crisply unearths the truth regarding family, fundamentalism, education, self-identity, abuse, and memory. At the same time, she also maintains a kind of ambivalence to not assign simple black and white roles to the people in her life. Irrespective of the social and cultural differences, Educated comes across a vital text to understand how true education can change one's mind for the better.

Born on September 1986 and raised near the mountainside in Idaho, Tara Westover was the seventh (and last) child of her Mormon survivalist parents. Dad and mom rigorously followed their religious dogma and were determined to protect their children from the encroaching modernity and brainwashing Illuminati. While the first three of Tara’s siblings had a birth certificate, the last four didn’t and consequently sheltered from public schooling. The mid-wife mom took over home-schooling. Dad put the children to work in a perilous, family-owned junkyard. Tara’s eldest siblings have a different memory of their father, a man capable of showing warmth and who didn’t fiercely impose his beliefs on others. But by the time Tara came into existence, the dad was on full-fanatic mode, scowling at anything connected with the modern world.

Westover didn’t set a foot inside an educational institution up until she left her home (in adolescence). However, she self-taught herself enough to attend Brigham Young University, and Tara eventually earned a doctorate from Harvard. The remarkable determination with which she leaped from the claws of her domineering family to liberation drives the subject of Tara’s memoir. Divided into three chapters, Tara starts by delineating her difficult childhood, and then comes the uncertain college-going days, and finally the present-day awakening. Although the three parts are equally moving, the most intriguing part for a reader would be Tara’s evocation of her childhood memories which is filled with emotional and physical pain. Dad’s obsession on God is at an extreme level that he regards plenty of his careless highway and junkyard accidents as God’s Will.

Tara Westover

Tara details the shocking, avoidable accidents at the junkyard to which she and her siblings were often subjected to. Juggling between moments of silence, cheer, and fury (which later the author recognizes as Bi-polar disorder), dad infuses fear and terror into his children more than warmth and love. A little slip in the dressing code could earn Tara the label of ‘whore’. Mom acknowledges dad’s extreme behavior, but she largely compiles to his authority while assuaging her children’s physical injuries with home-made homeopathic ointments. However, one of Tara’s elder brothers, the sensitive and sensible Tyler with an interest in book and classical music, showed her a way out. Tyler, unlike his other brothers who left home only to do physical labor, decided to pursue education through college. He also encouraged Tara to escape from her own ignorance and tenacious parents by preparing for ACT test. Adding more to Tara’s domestic woes is the home-coming of her second-eldest brother Shawn (a pseudonym) who plays sickening head-games and inflicts violent abuse. He assaulted her repeatedly over the years, dragging her by her hair to shove her head into the toilet, twisting her wrist or choking her to unconsciousness for being ‘whorish’.

Tara passed the ACT test at age 16 (somehow teaches herself algebra and trigonometry to pass the exam) and heads off to college. But she was still ignorant about the ways of the world. She has never heard of the word 'Holocaust', thought Europe was a country, and her writing is too formal because the only book she often read is Bible. With support from worldly professors and putting her stupendous learning skills to use, Tara eventually graduated from Brigham Young University. While Tara insists on the importance of education, she doesn’t narrowly focus on her own educational achievements (like earning a doctorate). The heroic part of the book underlines how Tara’s education helped her to singe-handedly take on a powerful family which rejected and stayed silent over its history of physical and emotional abuse.

Tara Westover’s voice represents female equality and indicts patriarchy, but she does so by relating to the truth of her experiences that’s full of depth and complexity. The author has assigned pseudonyms to her family members who vehemently oppose her current stand. Yet Tara offers a very complex portrait of her siblings and parents without giving them simple roles of good and bad. “We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”, Tara writes as she attempts to bring the full personality of even dad and Shawn despite the irreparable damages they have inflicted upon others. At another occasion she writes, “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.” This is reflected in Tara’s ambivalent feelings while recalling her dad’s capacity for affection, which lies beneath his domineering and indifferent nature. Whether evoking the beauty of the picturesque landscapes she grew up or perfectly delineating the emotional scars she bears, Tara writes with rawness and uncommon intelligence. Altogether, Educated: A Memoir (400 pages) chronicles an eye-opening, soul-wrenching personal journey to exhibit what’s at the heart of education and what it can offer to one’s soul. 

The Hunger – A Nameless Evil Haunts the Snowbound Pioneers

“Then the Lord must be mightily displeased with you, because he has led you into the valley of death. Make peace with your Lord before it is too late, because the hungry ones are coming for you.”

Intelligence analyst-turned-novelist Alma Katsu’s The Hunger (published March 2018) adds a supernatural horror twist to the already infamous and terrifying ‘Donner Party’ incident of 1846-47. Parallels could be drawn between Alma’s novel and Dan Simmons’ Terror which also melded historical tragedy (the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845-46) with a mysterious, otherworldly intrusion. Although shorter than Simmons’ sprawling narrative, The Hunger, similar to Terror expertly amplifies the dread infusing this terrible historical journey (by evoking the bone-chilling atmospherics of vast American prairie) rather than only striving to conceive an insipid and gory monster-thriller.

The Donner party was group of American pioneers who set out from Missouri in May 1846 to California, but an ill-advised shortcut through the mountains left them stranded in the Sierra Nevadas for close to four months (snowed in for the winter). Of the 87 members of Donner party wagon train, eventually 48 made it to California alive. It was one of the gruesome events among the white American pioneers’ westward migration. Adding more to the legend of Donner Party, apart from the real horrors of despair and deprivation, were the reports of cannibalism (although some research studies have denied this). Katsu’s novel opens with a rescue team arriving at an abandoned cabin on April 1847, the spring following the cursed winter which befell upon the Donner Party. Then the novel leaps back in time and unfolds from multiple perspectives to painstakingly detail the long wagon train journey across the picturesque, vast stretch of grasslands.

The wealthy George Donner and his extended clan are easily the most prominent of the wagon train party. The Kesebergs, the Reeds, the Graveses, the Murphys, etc are some of the other families who have hitched themselves to the wagon trail. There are also teamsters, servants, and prospecting single men making this arduous trip; all pushing forward on the dusty trail to start anew. Alma Katsu unfolds her eerie tale largely from the viewpoint of the party’s outcasts. Charlie Stanton’s unmarried status has generally stoked mistrustfulness and contributing to that feeling is the rumors about Stanton’s past. Tamsen Donner, George’s beautiful young wife, is considered to be a witch, even though she mostly tends to her children and doesn't recruits virginal girls for her coven. The unmarried 20-year-old Mary Graves is another significant character in the novel who develops a tentative romantic relationship with Stanton.

The popular but feckless George Donner loses his glow once his decision to take a shortcut goes utterly wrong. Reed who takes charge of the party after George is wildly unpopular and craftily trumped by the 'evil' Keseberg. But the palpable horror in the novel starts with a child’s disappearance, followed by the discovery of child’s cruel murder. The killing is too messy to attribute it to Native Americans or the wolves. Slowly talks of evil and infectious spirit manifolds the wagon party families’ desperation for survival. The power struggles and shifting alliances allows the inexplicable evil to grow around them. As towering mountains lay ahead, ominous things rustles in the wintry night and when food runs out, the pioneers keep on making one bad decision after another.

The Hunger, even though takes a never-jangling deviation from history to the supernatural, ultimately focuses on the contrasts of human condition: resilience and pettiness; bravery and timidity; love and hate; empathy and indifference, etc. In fact, more than the creature-thrills, Hunger is at its best when it lays out the basest elements of people and scrutinizes it with a piercing objective gaze. Evil pervades the story’s grim atmosphere, but it isn’t spelled out in a distinct manner. The characters here interminably flawed and hence the bad things they do are understandably human. Particularly, I liked the character arc of Tamsen Donner, who starts off as a bewitching adulteress but Katsu slowly peels off the labels with which she is defined to deliver three-dimensional portrait of a repressed woman. Altogether, The Hunger is a smartly embellished character-driven re-telling of a notorious historical incident.