Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An enjoyable read for fans of Christian spec fic, September 16, 2006
I had the pleasure to spend time with Kathryn Mackel last year, taking a couple of her courses at the American Christian Fiction Writers conference. She's a dear woman who shows a genuine interest in fledgling writers. She provided excellent advice to me on my own novel, and I thank her for that.
At that time, she mentioned she'd just wrapped up _The Hidden_. The setup--a broken woman finds a mysterious amnesiac shackled deep in a remote Colorado mountain range--sucked me in immediately. With a premise that enticing, speculative fiction fans would be fools not to discover where that leads.
Boston psychiatrist Susan Stone carries within her enough loss to fill three people. Both her abusive mother and her gentle son committed suicide, and her husband died from a brain aneurysm. When her horseman father takes a nasty spill from a wild horse, she ventures back to his Colorado mountain ranch to face her demons. What she doesn't count on is confronting REAL demons.Galloping away from her dad's stables after muffing the delivery of a prized foal, she discovers a young man chained inside a ravine. His shackles lead into a hellish black hole of a cave. Rescuing him with a key she finds placed just outside his reach, she takes him back to the ranch to unlock his inner manacles. Along the way, God works to free her from a prison of her own making.
All this makes for a fantastic start. Mackel's owned the Christian "chiller" genre, as she calls it--those stories that combine horror, thriller, and supernatural genres. _The Hidden_ mixes all those genres expertly; the storyline delivers the goods. Mackel can write and Hollywood's called on her skills numerous times.
But Mackel's pedigree as a Hollywood screenwriter works against _The Hidden_ as well. The book's feel smacks of a film adaptation. Though the storyline is compelling, there's a tendency to rapidly shift gears, just like a film cutaway. At times it's obvious that Mackel's "underwriting" for no other reason than to withhold information. _The Hidden_ contains spots where Mackel introduces a character or action with little or no fanfare. That works well in a visual medium like film, but in a novel less so. Early on, ideas seem underdeveloped and descriptions too short to root the reader in the scene. For this reason, I found the first fifty pages difficult to follow. In other spots in the book, I had to reread to see if I'd missed something. Turns out I didn't.
Strong characterizations buoy the story. You feel the characters. Bringing compelling characters to life is hard work, but Mackel makes it look easy. Both the narration and the dialogue give readers precious insights into the motivations and thought processes of the story's inhabitants.
However, Mackel throws a few too many false clues into the mix in her effort to keep the identity of the amnesiac a secret. Once the finale wraps up, I had a hard time reconciling some of the apparently contrary scenes that featured the young man acting in a way not keeping with his ultimate character. Sadly, additional processing time and distance from the book don't clear up those contradictions.
Repetition of basic scene actions and elements shows throughout the book, but this is not merely the fault of _The Hidden_. Most of the fiction I've read in the last five years features a few too many scenes slightly modified from previous ones. (Frank Peretti's _Monster_ and Connie Willis's _The Passage_ are notable for this problem.) Mackel's scene elements may be more complex, but the repetition still exists: a meal, a painful recollection by Susan, some fantastical element centering on the amnesiac, a crotchety comment or two from Dad, a look into the young female farmhand's thought processes, and the cop shows up and makes some off hand remark that no one ever takes seriously (because he's always wrong). That's a typical scene. Plus horses.
The result is you want to skip to the end to find out how it all resolves. That's a positive for the basic strength of the story, but a negative for its ability to keep readers rooted in the middle section of the work. This may be due, in part, to publishers leaning toward books of greater length. This necessitates more fill in the middle. In the end, _The Hidden_ may be a better 230 page novel than the 280 page one Westbow published.
That said, you'll be hardpressed to find more than a handful of writers attempting the kind of work Mackel so joyfully gives to fans of Christian speculative fiction. By the very dearth of titles alone, this makes Mackel a treasure. Plus, she's an all-around nice person.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unique and Dependable, May 12, 2006
Mackel has quickly established herself as a writer of depth and suspense. Her first two novels combined original premises with supernatural/spiritual flavors, and they flowed nicely with the depth of her characters.
"The Hidden" uses the same ingredients, but lets them simmer a bit longer before boiling over with unique ideas, tension, and a surprise or two. This time around, Mackel takes readers into small-town Colorado, where gruesome deaths become linked with the lives of a family and the young man they find chained in a ravine. Each character has depth and motives that become clearer as the story goes along. Readers might think the path is leading in a straight-ahead fashion, but it starts to twist and turn. The spiritual ideas are developed well, and the final pages bring satisfaction in unexpected ways.
If you like tightly-wound stories that still manage to develop memorable characters and thought-provoking themes, "The Hidden" is one you'll want to read. I hope to see more from Mackel. She's never the same, but she's always dependable. I like that in a writer.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Strong supernatural elements combined with Christian values, March 11, 2006
Kathryn Mackel's novel The Hidden delves into forgiveness and supernatural forces. The heroine, psychologist Susan Rose, finds herself back home in Colorado to help care for the family horse farm after her father's accident. She discovers a boy chained in a dark cave, frees him, and begins to try to unravel his mysterious past despite his amnesia. However, inexplicable miracles begin happening in the valley, as well as several horrific murders involving unnatural fires.
Susan herself has been haunted by the ghosts of her past: her mother's suicide, her husband's death and also her son's. When she discovers Jacob, she is determined to protect him even if it means sacrificing her own emotions and relationships in the process. Jacob seems naive and innocent about the world she guides him through, despite the objections from her childhood friend, Rick; Rick, who is the local sheriff, suspects Jacob of the burning murders.
The book is well written, but has its dry spots throughout. The action is fast moving and captivating for the most part, compelling the reader to continue turning pages. The character development is strong, with intense emotions felt by the characters' dark, interconnected pasts fueling their actions in the present.
The Hidden is based upon Jude 6, which says, "...these [angels] He has kept under darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great day." What would happen if one of the dark angels was loosed from his chains and allowed to wreak havoc on the country valley? Mackel explores that premise along with strong elements of supernatural creatures and powers, but not without solid Christian values and outlooks.
Overall, I was enthralled by the book. There were times I could not put it down in order to find out what happened next, yet there were times when I was disturbed by the darkness of the supernatural actions. I would recommend that this book for ages sixteen and above, especially those drawn to fiction about angels or the supernatural. - Molly Schnepel, Christian Book Previews.com
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