A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson, Peter Elson (Illustrator)

A Hidden Place is a haunting tale of a small town and the universe outside. In the hard years of the Depression, young Travis lives with his aunt and uncle; upstairs lives the mysterious Anna. Anna says she's going to be changing, and needs Travis help to hide, for purposes she won't explain . . . which may involve the strange, powerful hobo known only as Bone.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Aliens, Historical Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Horror

212 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1986

About the author

I've been writing science fiction professionally since my first novel A Hidden Place was published in 1986. My books include Darwinia, Blind Lake, and the Hugo Award-winning Spin. My newest novel is The Affinities (April 2015).

Reviews

[Claudia · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Robert Runte · Rating 5 out of 5]

review from 1986

In one of the most intelligent cover quotes ever, Michael Bishop calls A Hidden Place "reminiscent of vintage Theodore Sturgeon in its moving and authentic evocations of place and people." In a genre dominated by ideas, Sturgeon stood out as an author prepared to deal with characterization, emotion, and values. In his first novel, Wilson clearly demonstrates these same strengths.

This is a compelling novel. Once you pick it up you can't put it down. It's not that it's an edge-of-the-seat thriller, the sort of fast paced plot that keeps you guessing what happens next. Hell, the cover tells you the whole plot. It's just that once you start, Wilson plunges you into such an emotional maelstrom you have to read through to the end, because you are driven by the same needs as the characters. The only way you are going to be able to get to sleep at night is if you, like the characters, work it through to Wilson's resolution.

What makes this particularly scary is that Wilson is clearly not the kind of guy to give you a throw away happy ending. If the characters win their struggles (mostly with themselves) all well and good; but if their basic flaws defeat them, then they're gonna die.

And what makes that unnerving is that nearly everyone in this book gets a turn as viewpoint character. You just know that they can't all make it, that at least some of these weak and deeply flawed people are going to succumb. And they're probably going to take the others with them.

But an uncertain ending is only a small part of the tension in this book. The real heart of the work is the way Wilson forces you to see each of the characters from their own point of view. Just when you start to despise this or that villian, Wilson pops you inside the bastard and makes you feel what the character feels. Wilson doesn't allow you to write anybody off with a simple condescending 'bad guy' label; everybody is a victim in Wilson's universe, and everybody's guilty to at least some extent. Unfortunately, that means you too, since you are forced into one viewpoint character after another.

So, you feel guilty about sympathizing with some very unsympathetic characters, but at the same time you feel quilty for having hated them before you understood what it was like to be them, and that makes you feel guilty about hating their real world analogs. Without realizing quite what's happening, you are caught up in the same sort of internal conflict as most of Wilson's characters.

Wilson is particularly effective in this because this is a book about fans. Not literally, of course, but in its emotional targets. The protagonist (if you can identify one character as such) is the archetypal fan, the loner alienated from the rest of society. The antagonists are fundamentalists, small town vigilantes, rapists, childabusers, bigots; all the too easily stereotyped and dismissed enemies of bookish urban liberals (i.e., fans). I'm not sure which is more uncomfortable: squirming inside the suddenly understandable persona of the antagonists, or seeing one's own weaknesses and powerlessness reflected in the protagonist.

Wilson wraps all these characters in the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of the deepening 1930s depression. The setting is not unlike a small room in which the walls are slowly closing in, building up an intolerable pressure on the central characters. To this Wilson adds the slow fuse of a freight train bearing down on our protagonists, tied as it were to the tracks.

This is an emotional book. It's about emotions. The central metaphor is of a mirror for the emotions into which the characters are compelled to look, though they are uncomfortable with their reflections. We perhaps understand their discomforture as we look into the mirror that is the book and see ourselves reflected in the characters we might have become had circumstances called forth those aspects of ourselves.

This is a good book. Maybe even an important one. As a first novel, it's absolutely amazing, and I was severely disappointed that Wislon failed to attract the critical attention and award nominations he so clearly deserved.

[Frédéric · Rating 3 out of 5]

I passed a good time reading this rather short book though I globally knew how it was going to unfold after 3 or 4 chapters because it was well written: style, settings, characters.

The bad: The plot is paper-thin and totally predictable; the characters are pure stereotypes. 2*

The good: the prose is quite good and these same characters totally hold the whole book up. These stereotypes (the loners/outcasts, the bigots, the libidinous husband, the vengeful bad boy...) are multi-layered enough to rise above their condition and sustain interest. Their thoughts, feelings and point of views are dense and clearly exposed and much more substantial than what I expected at first sight. 4*

Not the thriller of the year, no siree, but if you have a good library and a few hours to spare, well...

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant. Wow. Horror, speculative fiction, and a study of what the Great Depression did to the working class of middle America. Recommended to readers of Dean Koontz, or admirers of the The Ox-Bow Incident, or fans of classic The Twilight Zone... or just about anyone.

A bit too brutal & horrifying for my taste, but mercifully concise & accessible; I got through it in a "comfortable" afternoon.

(My mm pb edition not included here on GR and I'm not in the mood to add it, sorry.)

[Mitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars
This was a really fascinating read more for the way this book is structured.
First, the writing is great and the underlining themes Wilson is trying to convey are complex, deep and interesting.
The problem is that this book either needed to be half the length or double the size because they're are times when the story just feels like it's moving on fast forward. There are entire character arcs done off screen. The story hints at a longer time period then there really is. And the town is full of interesting characters that are never given any time to breath. This really feels like someone took a standard but solid Stephen King story but removed all of the great character set-up in King's book. It's very, very bizarre.
And I think because it such a weird and curious little novel (and because the writing is genuinely great) that I can give a tepid recommendation for any Robert Charles Wilson fan out there to pick this one up.
Just don't start here if you're new to this author. Especially when Spin exists.

[Tomislav · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had been attempting to read Robert Charles Wilson's entire backlog, and read this early novel of his in 2008.

[Gregoire]

Difficile de donner une appréciation sur ce premier roman
On retrouve une recherche sensible et intimiste sur le destin et la personnalité des personnages dans une Amérique des profondeurs durant la grande dépression, façon J Steinbeck (j'ai pensé à " Des souris et des hommes"), le tout avec une pointe d'étrangeté qui maintient l'attention du lecteur sans pour autant arriver à passionner

à relire peut-être sans s'attendre à de la SF ???

[Snakes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interdimensional beings experience the best and worst of humanity before their own metamorphosis. Taut and submersive in tone but perhaps too esoteric to be truly transcendent. Another pretty good PKD Award nominee.

[Metaphorosis · Rating 4 out of 5]

reviews.metaphorosis.com

4 stars

Travis, a young man come to live in a small plains town with his estranged aunt and uncle, finds there Anna, their mysterious lodger, and Nancy, as much a misfit as himself. Together, they gradually get more involved with Anna and with each other.

I think A Hidden Place was the second Wilson book I read, after Gypsies. Or perhaps the other way around. Either way, the books struck me, and I picked up several of his books in the late 80s and early 90s. There was nothing startling about them - just quiet, somewhat eerie books about normal people. In some ways, they're like Clifford Simak's books or Jack Finney's, but more distant from their central characters.

A Hidden Place (the title really has little to do with the book) takes place in a Depression-era, Steinbeckian world of freight trains, hobo jungles, and small town rigidity. The events are minor, the concerns mainly personal. Travis is a classic loner, but a genuine one, not a Hollywood cutout. Nancy is an equally classic small town girl looking for something more. Wilson does a very nice job of presenting two young people trying to find themselves, with the mysterious stranger more of a catalyst than focal point. He switches points of view frequently but clearly, including a deft hand with Bone, the rangy hobo traveling the country with no clear purpose. Most of the foreground characters, good and bad, feel like real people, though some key minor actors are a bit flimsy. Sadly, it's only in the middle of the book that Nancy really emerges, fading back after that to her supporting cast role.

This one of Wilson's stronger books, from a more character-centered early period, before he went slightly off track with Bios and later the Spin series. It's about mysteries and people more than answers.

Not the book if you're looking for wild adventure and space opera, but definitely worth your time for something smaller, closer, and more human.

[C. L. Deards · Rating 4 out of 5]

If an encounter with an alien race were to occur this is how it would go down.

As most people who are avid science fiction readers know it's highly unlikely that aliens are anything like us. In fact, they are probably so different from us that their perception of reality is wholly different from how we perceive reality.

Robert Charles Wilson interweaves the struggles a man has in coming to a depression era town under strenuous circumstances with an encounter with a couple of aliens trying to find their way back home. Even the way the aliens came to Earth is conventional in the traditional sense of traveling--some kind of inter-dimensional travel between the folds of space that is beyond our understanding.

Wilson pulls together the threads of a town facing its own struggles in the depression era, the down and out man from a questionable family relative, and a person within the town who has her own problems in trying to escape the town with the aliens who are slowly losing their human disguises as their energy and injuries drain away. The latter creates an overarching suspense.

For me this isn't a five star story because the pace was often slow and would lose me. Would have been a five star novel had it had the pacing of a story like, say, Spin or The Chronoliths.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, just like everything I've read by Robert Charles Wilson so far. He's one of the few authors whose entire collection of books is now on my shelf. It almost doesn't matter what he writes about, it's written well, with a compelling plot and interesting characters. I wish I'd discovered his books sooner. A Hidden Place is truly unique, a combination of science fiction and depression-era historical fiction. I can imagine some readers would be frustrated by the fact that the sci fi part of the plot doesn't really emerge until about 40% in, but for me that just added to the suspense. I had just begun to think to myself, "I thought I was reading science fiction" when I got to that part of the plot. It's not five stars good like Spin, but it's definitely worth the read.

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Robert Wilson is a science fiction writer in the tradition of John Wyndham. That is to say that he writes good, solid novels with convincing characters that just happen to have sci fi elements.
This novel is set in small town America during the Depression, and it conjures up the hopelessness of unemployed men; the frustration of a young man who is trapped by circumstance; and the fear and uncertainty of that time and place.
All of these things are brought together by events that could be described as science-fictional - the beauty of the book is that the unusual elements highlight the ordinary, making a story about people rather than a fantasy about aliens.

[Jasen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writer’s first novel & you can tell. There are small pockets of prose here but I felt it was borrowing so much from other places that I already knew where it was going & was ok with it ending. Back to the library donation pile.

“Fatigue lay on him now, like a drunk, but he could not sleep. Fatigue and this new shattering weakness. Electricity seems to crawl over the surface of the skin. It reminded him of the time he had accepted from another tramp, the offer of a swallow of muscatel. The liquor had burned like fire, and a little while later he’s had spasmed it all up again. Since then, he has been careful to take only water.” P.10

“...the scissorbill fell backward j to the scummy slough, dead before the of death could enter his mind.” P.19

“She liked these times best, she thought, all the people around her, the aimless chatter. It was like being pulled in many directions at once. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine herself floating, the baked goods like scattered islands in an ocean of afternoon, the heat on her like a benediction. Everything condensed and this minute point of experience.” P.39-40

“Love, says the vow, and honor, and obey. Maybe love goes. Maybe honor goes, even. But there is that last. I can have that much of a marriage. I can obey.” P.55

“Too, he had seen death often enough among the railway tramps, and it was not attractive. There was a kind of shamefulness about a human body after death, Bone thought, the limpness, like a child’s costly doll to casually discarded. To Bone, the dead always seemed insulted: subject to indignities, and passively sullen.” P.97

“Faerie,” She said breathlessly. “The land under the hill.”
“In a way. But a real place, too. Substantial. The laws of nature function differently there, I think, but they do function, and as remorselessly as here. A place, not a land of abstractions.” She said, a papery sound. “When we cross – and we have our own vision-quest, are on spirit walks – we’ve been called by other names. Demon, succubus, changeling....” P.132

“She was, he realized, the woman his mother had not been, the woman his mother had failed to be: she was the woman he had looked for, and Nancy, too, and most particularly in an eye place.
The woman he had not found.
And he thought, shivering in the darkness, stricken: what if there is no such woman? What if she doesn’t exist?” P.144

“Then why had he come? Because of Liza, he thought – her stern conviction that this would better them in someway. And for more pragmatic reasons. They are in the corner with a glass of brandy, was his banker, a man named Crocket, who held the mortgage on his house; seated at the table, was Jeff Baines, the realtor, to whom Creath must turn when, inevitably, it came time to sell the ice plant; and there, by the potted Chinese evergreen, was Jim St. Hubert, the undertaker who would one day escort him into the cold weedy doil up at Glen Acres. In pieces in fragments these men owned him. He was beholden to them.” P.177

“He looked at Bone. Maybe and I was right. Maybe this was what he had been then: this disfigured thing, so fused with pain so entirely that there was no room for kindness, trust, thought. Bone stood, shivering, regarding him from the depths of his dilated eyes. His fists were clenched and white.
Trembling, Travis reached out toward the monster.” P.193

“No “ Faye Wilson said bleakly. “It was stupid to come here.” She went to the kitchen door and opened it. The hinges squealed; a breeze danced inside. There was the smell of woodsmoke. It was what Liza add, always loved about autumn, that melancholy perfume on the air, the smell of winter stocking somewhere beyond the horizon. A dry leave, wind – born, screwed over the kitchen floor. “ pray for them,” Faye said. “ please do at least that much.” P.194

[Kristin Blake-Meade · Rating 3 out of 5]

The only thing wrong with this book is that it’s not my style. It’s beautifully written, filled with lots of charming symbols and metaphors and RCW has a wonderful ability to describe something so mundane and fill it with beauty and unique perspective. But I like my science fiction to have more science fiction. I found this book beautifully boring, which is the best way I can describe it. I would have retired from reading it if I hadn’t read the last book of the Spin trilogy and experienced the most incredible change in a book I’d ever read. The first 3/4ths was mediocre at best but transformed into one of the most amazing endings that I’ve ever read in the last quarter of the book and it blew me away. I was holding on to A Hidden Place hoping that maybe that would happen here too. And I was disappointed greatly. Once again, this isn’t a bad book, it’s just not for me.

[John Rennie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm afraid I did not like this at all.

The book is competently written but the characters never came alive for me, and more to the point the characters are mostly pretty repellant. Nancy is the only one I found a shred of sympathy for. Travis urgently needed to grow up, and the remaining characters were basically nasty.

The underlying plot is pretty trivial, so the vast majority of the book consisted of repellant characters being beastly to other repellant characters. Altogether it was not one of the finer uses of the precious time I have for reading.

[nathaniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

You don't get a lot of depression era stories in books and movies any more. We still get loads of WWII content, but not depression. Hobo isn't even really in the lexicon anymore.

The story was smart and appropriately short. Only a little sff - it would have been pretty easy to have removed the otherworldly aspects and replaced them with something else to hit the themes. It was interesting to see a book from 1986 basically indicting toxic masculinity.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprise

This might have been a perfect character study of rural folks in the Great Depression, showing all the fear they faced with nothing but that old time religion to see them through. The hobos—desperate men—posed a threat to those townspeople as well, and then, in their midst appeared something unexplainable that was at once compelling and repulsive. It showed a light on anyone who came into contact. A strange tale, indeed.

[Rennie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Classic good vs evil character analysis with a sci-fi twist - what's not to like. Well constructed story populated with people fleshed out with enough detail to not be one-dimensional. The pace was perfect for me and it held my interest right to the end. A 3.25 book- if we can't select a 3.5 that gives us the leeway to come up with new fractions.

[Hermano · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this story of hope and humanity. The author has a knack for taking complicated characters and showing their humanity. Using the harshness of the depression as a setting was perfect for this novel.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his debut novel Robert Charles Wilson admirably evokes a time and place, the brutality and desperation of the American mid-west in the 1930s. The mystery behind the reclusive young seamstress in the attic may easily be deduced but it is the quality of the writing that shines through. Impressive.

[Brian Gaston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an early Wilson effort and foreshadows how good he would become. This isn't my favourite Wilson novel but still a good read.

[Lara · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little too much realism in the depression and bitterness and other-mistrust of a small town in the Great Depression

[Earl Truss · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot express how much I loved this book. I could hardly put it down.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

High 3.

[Emil Junaković · Rating 3 out of 5]

ET meets Tom Sawyer (or at least that was the vibe i was getting). Nothing epic, nothing bad, just average, decent lil book to help you dose off after hard days work.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

During the Depression, a young man goes to live with his aunt and uncle. A mysterious girl lives upstairs that isn't quite normal. And meanwhile, a lonely drifter wanders the roads, drawn by some impulse towards another part of the country.

Robert Charles Wilson is one of my favorite authors. But it took him a while to get there. Some of his earlier work I've read, I liked, but not as much as his more recent offerings. This book is his first novel.... so I approached it with both curiosity and a little trepidation. First novels are often a little rough.

This one? It's a mix. I think technically it's fairly well done, the prose is good, at least the main characters seemingly well-drawn (if they sometimes change their opinion suddenly).

And yet... it just didn't really do anything for me. I didn't connect to the characters as I usually do, and the storyline just didn't thrill me. Part of it was the setting... I'm not generally a fan of period pieces. But the plot just seemed to drag on in kind of an expected direction... it seemed like a story better suited for a short story, to be honest, and even at that length it wouldn't have been one that impressed me much.

So two stars, only okay. But if this is your first experience with the author, check out some of his later work.

[Jeff Koeppen · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading RCW's Blind Lake (very good) and Spin (great) I went after his first novel, The Hidden Place. This was a short work compared to his latter novels, and therefore the ideas weren't as big and the characters not as developed. The mystery in the novel wasn't explored very deeply; it would have been interesting to learn more about the non-human characters. Furthermore, I thought some of the interactions between the characters were rather odd and overly creepy, and that took away from the story. Being set in the Great Depression, the book had a desperate and hopeless tone, which was an interesting contrast to the version of home the aliens came from. Overall, it was a good read with a bunch of interesting characters and some twists and turns which kept me turning the pages. I'm looking forward to working my through the rest of RCW's bibliography.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of Mice and Men meets science fiction as hoboes and the townspeople who fear them mix with... aliens? People from another dimension?

Normally, I'm pretty happy with Robert Charles Wilson's implementation of a premise, whereby the characters drive the story and the science fiction as magic takes a secondary place in starting all of the wheels of plot and character in motion. Here, I didn't entirely buy it, thanks to an incomplete and slightly fuzzy take on "the Jeweled World" and the powers of the inhabitants and their incursion into ours. Don't get me wrong: I still couldn't put it down. It's just that, after the dust had cleared, justice meted out to characters good and bad, the plot left a minor bad taste due to the openness of the premise and the large number of directions it could have taken.

[John]

All of Robert Charles Wilson's books, that I've read, have been excellent, and all of them have been quite different from the others. He is a very unpredictable, yet consistently good author. This book had a very beautiful and poetic sense to it, almost as if it MUST have been written by a woman (sorry if that is a stereotype). The characters were very well developed and the plot unpredictable. Wilson has written some "Hard Science" SF books, but this NOT one of them. I would call this book "Romantic Fantasy" long before I would even call it "Science Fiction". The plot centers around a couple of misfit twenty-somethings in a small-town depression-era mid-west setting, and their encounters with a strange alien "woman". HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

[Abner Rosenweig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is supernatural sci-fi/fantasy set in small-town depression-era America and is highly redolent of Stephen King. It may not be as suspenseful as King's better work--the plot is dull and predictable at times--but the work is more poetic and literary than King, as if King and Bradbury wrote a book together. This was my introduction to Robert Charles Wilson. Despite that it's one of his lesser novels, it's a well-developed, gorgeously woven story that certainly makes me want to read more of the author's work.