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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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THE HIKE

Drew Magary

THE HIKE is a wildly inventive, hilarious fantasy novel. When Ben has to take a business trip to rural Pennsylvania, he decides to spend an open afternoon taking a quick hike through the Poconos. But once he sets out into the woods behind his shabby hotel, he stumbles onto a path that leads him inescapably forward into a world of cannibalistic giants, demons, giant insects, and other bizarre and fantastic creatures.
When Ben, a CFO for a small construction company, has to take a business trip to rural Pennsylvania, he decides to spend an open afternoon taking a quick hike through the Poconos. A short hike. A leisurely hike. But once he sets out into the woods behind his shabby hotel, he stumbles onto a path that leads him inescapably forward into a world of cannibalistic giants, demons, giant insects, and other bizarre and fantastic creatures. Desperate to return to his family, with an enjoyably profane crustacean as his only companion, he forges on, through one adventure after another, in search of the “Producer,” the creator of the hell in which he has been held hostage.

Magary has created a remarkably unique novel that gives a clear nod to The Odyssey, but immediately calls to mind contemporary successes such as Ernest Cline's Ready Player One and Neil Gaiman's American Gods, along with the old King’s Quest PC games that Magary played as a child. In The Postmortal, he showed how he could pull off his own take on the traditional sci-fi novel. In The Hike, he now does it with fantasy.

Magary is a correspondent for GQ and a columnist for Deadspin. He's also the author of the memoir Someone Could Get Hurt (nominated for an Audie award and optioned for TV by Warner Brothers and Conan O’Brien) and The Postmortal. He has written for Maxim, New York, NPR, NBC, The Atlantic, Bon Appetit, The Huffington Post, the Awl, Gawker, Penthouse, Playboy, Yahoo!, ESPN, Rolling Stone, Comedy Central, and more. He's been featured on Good Morning America and has been interviewed by the AV Club, the New York Observer, USA Today, US News. His Twitter feed has over 100,000 followers. He lives in Maryland with his wife and three kids.
Available products
Book

Published 2016-08-02 by Viking

Book

Published 2016-08-02 by Viking

Comments

It all unfolds much like a video game does, so readers who don't enter this world with a lot of preconceived notions should have a blast . . . Magaray even nails the ending with a Twilight Zone twist that would have Rod Serling nodding with approval. Read more...

The Hikeis so much fun, has so much pure velocity, that I didn't realize until it was too late--what I thought was a drumbeat of excitement was actually the novel’s secret, powerful heart. Magary’s new book is a metaphysical thrill ride that will stay with me.

Amazon's pick forBest Book of the Month-Sci Fi and Fantasy (August 2016) Read more...

The Hikeis Cormac McCarthy’sAlice in Wonderland—gritty and terrifying but with deliriously surreal twists and turns. There’s not a chapter that doesn’t shock and surprise, andunderneath it all is the levity and wit I’ve come to expect of Drew Magary’s writing.

An excerpt from Drew Magary’s novel The Hike.

Novelist Charles Yu interviewed Magary for Salon. Read more...

High profile praise on Twitter fromTa-Nehisi Coates(700k followers),Patton Oswalt(2.78 million followers),GQ(849k followers), and more

...a fantasy tale with a deeply disturbing horror veneer doused with life lessons, moral ambiguity, andunanswerable questions . . . It's also a damn fun book. Read more...