Book
Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak
Synopsis
Mallory is a recovering drug addict working to get her life back on track, and through her sponsor, she manages to land a dream job as live-in nanny for a wealthy family in an affluent neighborhood. Teddy, the bright and imaginative child in her care, loves to draw and is constantly sharing his happy pictures with his parents and new friend Mallory. But the pictures often include Anya, his imaginary friend. And as he gets closer to Mallory, he shares increasingly unsettling pictures suggesting a violent crime and a vengeful spirit that lives inside the house.
Notes
I can’t say for sure whether the cover blurb from Stephen King stuck the idea in my head, but I got very strong vibes of classic King stories from this one. The writing is confident and straightforward in a way that compels you to keep reading, but it’s also good at establishing mood and getting you into the mindset of its main character, so it never feels like it’s just skipping along the surface of a shallow page-turner.
And like the best (imo) King stories, there’s the suggestion of mildly supernatural abilities on the part of the protagonist that make her uniquely suited to driving the story.
The inclusion of Teddy’s drawings could have been a gimmick, but I thought they were so well done that they’re crucial to the book. Reading this at night gave me a jump scare in a way that felt cinematic. An appendix in my version has an interesting interview between the author and his artist friends who created the drawings, and it talks about their process and includes some of their work on the way to settling on the final versions. It was a nice touch to acknowledge how much they’re an essential part of the novel.
The author also acknowledges that he was influenced by The Turn of the Screw, which isn’t surprising but made me happy to see the explicit acknowledgment. Maybe it’s just that my bar has been lowered too far by “the hot new New York Times bestseller!” marketing, but I just appreciated seeing an author approach popular fiction with a literary mindset, even if it doesn’t have the pretense of being literary fiction.
This is definitely more of a thriller than a horror story, and I thought it was excellent at maintaining an oppressively creepy mood and ratcheting up the tension in believable ways. The conceit of the protagonist being in recovery is outstanding, since there’s a baseline sense of dread and tension before it even layers on the ghost story mystery: this job is so important to her, and she knows that she’ll be perceived as untrustworthy, so she’s in constant fear not just of the ghost, but of how she’ll lose everything if she dares to tell anyone what’s happening. And it’s threatening not just her, but an innocent child she’s gotten attached to.
And not really related to the book, but something I thought was interesting: I was googling to get an idea of the book, to find out whether I should barrel through as fast as I could before my library loan ran out. At least at the time I’m writing this, the top non-professional reviews on Reddit and Goodreads both seem to be written by the same person, and they each trash the book for being “right-wing propaganda.” It was interesting because it seemed like a willful attempt to misinterpret everything in the book, and it’s so couched in “terminally online” speak that it reads like a parody.
I feel like it says something about the current “trust nothing you read” state of the internet that I’m suspicious it’s even real, since its prominent placement in search results makes it seem like viral marketing to keep conversation about the book alive.
Verdict
Surprisingly solid, and the first half is excellently tense and creepy. The conclusion is very implausible but still satisfying enough, and the author is careful to show his work and explain the significance of all the clues he’d set up along the way, but even if it didn’t go a little off the rails (again, in the manner of classic Stephen King), it couldn’t live up to the mood and tension of the first half. I really enjoyed it, and I think it works well as a supernatural thriller, a creepy ghost story, and a murder mystery.