How Does 'The Hike' End?

Just finished reading The Hike by Geoff Mothapo and man, what an amazing ending to the story. After what felt like an eternity, the protagonist Ben finally reaches the Cabin and what a mind-bending experience that was. I really loved how every strange creature and twist along the way all made sense in the end. It really was an incredible journey and I am so glad that I read it. The way Ben meets the Producer of his story and how the Producer is this all-powerful God-like figure was great. His offer to Ben to rewrite his life to remove all of the trauma that he has experienced would mean that he would never be able to remember his wife and kids again. This was a very agonizing choice for Ben and I think that it was really well done. Throughout the book Ben had been trying to find his way back to his wife and kids and in the end he had to make a choice between a painless lie and the painful truth.

It brought me to tears when Ben made the choice to keep his real memories (the horrors of the forest and all) even though they would continue to plague him. Ben returns to his life. At first, it seems like everything is going to be fine for him. But then we are left with Ben in his life and the horrors of the forest still there for him in the form of shades of reality. It is ambiguous and we are left with so many questions about the reality of the forest and his life before the hike. The way the lines are blurred in order to make us question reality is brilliant. And then, in typical Gibbons fashion, we are left with the image of a crab. The rest of the story was just a series of events that, in the end, added up to Ben’s journey and the story he has told himself in order to deal with his past traumas. And, for me, the oddest part of the story was the ways in which Ben was able to perceive the various creatures that he encountered on his hike. While it was often strange and illogical, it felt realistic in a way that I have not encountered in a lot of the weird fiction that I have read.

One of the most redeeming qualities of the book is the way that it reverses one’s perception of the other odd creatures that Ben encountered during his journey. Now it makes sense that there were talking crabs and these giant, zombie-like monsters trying to destroy him. It all seemed so random and weird, but in reality, it was all fragmentary parts of his psyche trying to work through his grief. And the Cabin was the locus of this event. It was the place where Ben could have given in to his baser impulses and gone back to his more mundane life of ease and pleasure, but instead chose to suffer through the pain of remembering his lost loved ones. That, my friends, is the very essence of what it means to be resilient. And how he chose to do it is the heart of the book. The ending doesn’t provide the reader with a neat and tidy package of answers, rather it trusts the reader to grapple with the contradictions in Ben’s choice just as Ben had to grapple with them in order to make the choice that he did. ‘The Hike’ is not a book for everyone, but it is a book that will stick with you long after you finish it.

As a writer of this Path, the ending is a masterful realization of thematic payoff. Every one of the weird and wacky detours that Ben took on his journey stripped away piece by piece a different part of himself: his identity, his body, his sanity. So when he finally comes to the door at the end of the hike, all he really wants is to go home. In taking away everything that Ben had ever wanted for himself as a character, the writer of this story had stripped away everything that Ben had thought he wanted for himself on this journey. And in the end, it was only his truest need that was left. A very brutal but beautiful read.

The ending fails on a couple of levels. First, it provides no narrative justice to the antagonists that tortured Ben and tried to kill him throughout the novel. The cloud beings are just left to continue their twisted ways, and the game-show host is never held accountable for his actions. The ending of a story should balance the scales thematically, and here Ben’s escape is purely personal and does nothing to change the world he has traveled through. It’s a very selfish ending, and Ben’s journey has been about him enduring until he can leave the Path, not about making any positive changes along the way. It’s a very bleak and cynical message, wrapped up in a pretty and poetic package.