Quick one! The Hike is Drew Magary's fourth book and second novel. I've been reading Magary regularly on Deadspin for a good five years or so, where his ALL CAPS-heavy "dad in the suburbs" shtick is so distinctive that at first I worried he'd struggle to make the transition from "writer" to "author." But you know what? This works. I read Magary's The Postmortal five years ago (wow!) and I thought it was pretty good right up until the end, when it collapsed into a mess of dystopian tropes with no real conclusion. This is a much lower-concept story; a man (a suburban father of three from Maryland who grew up in Minnesota - hmm...) goes out for a solitary walk in the woods one day and very quickly ends up on a video game-esque adventure that blends The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy with talking crabs, time travel, smoke monsters, magic beans - wait, did I call this low concept?
For real though, it is. This is a story in which a man endures a lot of shit - weird shit, scary shit, mundane shit - in order to reunite with his family. And while there isn't a lot of depth to mine from "middle-aged guy misses his wife and kids," this was still an effective and even kind of moving story. Very relatable, and at 278 pages it's short enough to finish in a couple of days or even one long sitting. (Shortest thing I've read all year, in fact. #LongReads2016)
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