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 tru...

review from 1986In 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-t...

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 r...

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

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.)

3.5 StarsThis 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 f...

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 ???

reviews.metaphorosis.com 4 starsTravis, 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 noth...

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 fin...

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 f...

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 d...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 th...

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...

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 "Rom...

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...

In typical Christy fashion I knew nothing about this book or the author when I opened and began reading. I didn't even read the back. So after the first few chapters I was actually really surprised to see it turn into a science-fiction book. But I loved it. I wish it had transitioned a bit smoother at parts because it made the sci-fi twist less believable the way it just jumped into plot changes, but I very much enjoyed the book.

I didn't know who Robert Charles Wilson was when I started reading this so I was very surprised when the science fiction part came up halfway through the book but it was great. It's a quick read and it's really captivating. The ending was disappointing and not surprising. I feel like he could have challenged himself more than he did. However, I love the different narrators throughout the book.

I didn't realize this was sci-fi when I checked it out, so it was not what I was expecting. I didn't find it to be "haunting" as the cover professed. I think there was a good idea behind it, but in general it lacked... a lot. I thought it was just a lousy sort of alien story, not very entertaining or interesting.

Wilson's award-winning first novel is quite a bit different than his more recent work bur no less compelling. In this tale, set during the Great Depression, Wilson explores what it truly means to be a misfit.

I'll get back to this...I'm taking this paperback with me to ScandinaviaLOVE RCW's books

Wonderful, as all the rest of Robert Charles Wilson's books. Recommended in full.

I liked this book, but I'm not sure the melding of science fiction and historical fiction was entirely successful. I was more interested in the story before the scifi elements came into it.

His first novel. Interesting enough, but not great. Mystery and fantasy in the depression-era midwest.