Books like A Hidden Place

A Hidden Place is RCW’s first novel. If I hadn’t read so, I wouldn’t have even guessed, that’s how skillfully written is.The story takes place in a small rural American town, the eerie and creepy kind, due to both harsh conditions of Depression years and its inhabitants.After his mother’s death, Travis comes to live with his aunt and her husband. They have another tenant, a quiet and astonishingly beautiful young woman, Anna, who is not what she appears to be. Living there he learns the ugly truth about what’s going on and he, together with his girlfriend Nancy, decide to help her escape the house. Turns out the woman indeed needed their help but for a totally different reason.There is no action packed story, nor a fast paced one, but the reader is caught immediately into it. Because this is what RCW does best: interweaves flawed characters, tormented mostly by their inner demons within a story slowly built, gradually instilling anxiety into readers, making them go through a whole range of emotions and changing their mind about the characters several times until the end.It is a “sweet and subtle probing into the question of what it means to be human. There’s a resonance in this book, an illumination of depths” as Jack Dann deftly said. There are brutes which are more humane than apparently decent people; the religious ones are not always righteous too. There are actions which are not to blame even if everybody thinks so. And there are wounds which cannot be healed unless they are opened again.It’s the kind of book which still grows on you even after finishing it. You’ll find new things to ponder upon, replaying a scene in your head and discover that it can be seen in a new light. Ingenious, clever, elusive, uncanny, brutal, sensitive and powerful. Robert Charles Wilson deserves much more credit than he gets.