I recently finished reading The Hike by Drew Magary, a fast paced adventure story with existential philosophical undertones.
Brief Synopsis
While on a business trip hours away from home, a middle aged man decides to go on a hike in the woods before meeting his clients for dinner at his hotel. He heads out into the woods and stumbles upon a supernatural pathway that he cannot get off of. While on the trail he faces a continuous series of obstacles and challenges that he must face and overcome if he should ever leave the pathway and return home to his wife and children.
One of the nice things about this book is that it get started with the action immediately, without any sort of delay or build up. I was surprised and excited by fact that things were already happening within the first few pages of the first chapter of the story. Its kind of nice when things start happening right away rather than taking multiple chapters to kick things off.
The book reminded me of a video game, a fairytale and an escape room all rolled into one wacky adventure. It was mostly light hearted with some really great and entertaining characters, but also with enough seriousness and philosophy to keep me interested.
The book is very fast paced, like I said, with each chapter bringing forward a new challenge and a new adventure for the protagonist. I will admit that at first I found this aspect of the novel to be a little boring in that everything felt inconsequential and almost repetitive in a way. After a short time it all started to feel like a repeating pattern, in which a obstacle or challenge would be presented and then the protagonist would simply over overcome it. At first that removed any sort of suspense for me and I had to push my self a little in the begining and just tell myself that this is just meant to be an entertaining "vibes" kind of story. But then maybe around the 40% mark I really started to get into it, when I realized that there is a sort of underlying existential philosophy being presented here. That for me made it more mysterious and brought back the suspense and I found myself really wanting to find out the meaning of it all. For me this part of the story gave me something to think about on a deeper level and is the part that stayed with me after I finished the book.
I will say that the philosophical aspect that I'm referring to was subtle. At no point did the book feel heavy to me, though there were some parts that were meant to be more emotional. If you don't like deeper meaning to your books than you could also easily just read this one for the adventure vibes and entertainment, and I think it would still be a satifying read if thats your jam.
I think that there is too much going on here to turn this one into a movie but I could definitely see this becoming a 4 to 5 episode miniseries.
I gave this book 5 out of 5 stars overall. It was a fast paced, fun, and with enough substance to keep me thinking about it for some time afterwards. I would recommend!!