Jason Rekulak

Absolutely phenomenal. From the first paragraph, I was hooked. The addition of drawings really bring out the story and fully flush out the creepy vibe of it all.

Mallory is a 19 year old recovering addict at her first chance at a job now that she's sober. It's to nanny for a couple and their 5 year old child. Mallory was easy to understand and like. I felt bad for her regrets and really loved her new embracing of her world. And, of course, I was horribly jealous of her run times!

As Mallory show more became increasingly worried about the artwork that was popping up, it was easy to get swept up in her worry, fear and her dogged need to know what was going on. The story kept me guessing the whole time, never able to really put my finger on what was going on. I was fully wrapped in Mallory's ideas and explanations so as each layer of the story unfolded, I was there holding my breath and waiting for the next reveal. The story is addictive, engrossing and will make you stay up way later than you should. I hope we see more from this author, I will definitely be looking out for it! show less

I read Jason Rekulak's first novel back in 2017 and loved it. I was thrilled to see that he had penned a new book - Hidden Pictures. This descriptor and cover from the publisher caught my eye...."comes a wildly inventive spin on the classic horror story in Hidden Pictures, a supernatural thriller about a woman working as a nanny for a young boy with strange and disturbing secrets." Who else liked it? Stephen King did..."I loved it."

I quite liked the flawed but likable lead character show more Mallory. She's a recovering addict and desperately wants this second chance to pan out. She's making good money, has her own little cabin to live in, the parents seem like good people and their little boy Teddy is a joy. Sounds great right? But...yup, there's that but. Young Teddy starts drawing some increasingly disturbing pictures. The parents dismiss her concerns but....

I'm going to leave things there for you to discover. Rekulak's plot is inventive and insidious. The creep factor increases as Teddy's drawings begin to tell an unsettling tale. The drawings included in the book from illustrators Will Staehle and Doogie Horner add extra goosebumps.

Hidden Pictures was a page turner for me. I was caught up in the story and really wanted to know what/who was behind the pictures as well as the why. I have to say, Rekulak surprised me with a twist that no reader could predict on the way to the answers. Bravo! I absolutely love being caught off guard with what direction a book is going to take. A few situations require a some grains of salt - but go with it. It's entertainment I'm after and I definitely found it in the pages of Hidden Pictures. show less

This is the "ghost story junkie's" kind of story in spades! A disturbing secret that has far-reaching consequences comprises this dark and unusual ghost story. Mallory Quinn is just recently out of rehab and is recovering from a tragedy. She has taken a job as the nanny for a well to do couple living in the ritzy suburb of Spring Brook, New Jersey. A series of strange events start to make her...as well as her employers, begin to question their own sanity. Teddy is her precocious and shy show more 5-year-old boy that she's in charge of. The child seems to be haunted by a ghost who uses his body to draw pictures. These pictures are far too complex and well-drawn to have been the work of any child this young. At first, the drawings are rather typical...rabbits, hot air balloons, trees.... then the illustrations take a sinister, dark turn, showing the grime, gory details of gruesome murders. The drawings start out as stick figures but soon grow increasingly more disturbing and much more sophisticated. By now the reader is so into the story that you can't stop. With the help of an attractive young gardener and a psychic neighbor and using only the drawings as clues, Mallory feels that she must solve the mystery of the house's grizzly past before it's too late. Jason Rekulak does a fantastic job defining all these characters and giving them believable personalities: The story is mostly told by Mallory in the first person. The Maxwells' slightly overbearing parenting style and passive-aggressive quips feel and sound, very familiar; and Teddy is so three-dimensional that he sometimes feels like a real child that you could reach out and touch. The is almost enough to make you believe in ghosts. As my grandmother used to tell us as children..."I don't believe in ghost but I'm very much afraid of them". You will be very much afraid of them. show less

Heck no to the plot twist.

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through NetGalley. This review contains spoilers.)

The nostalgia factor is strong with this one, and the cheeky caper premise channels '80s movies like whoah (think: The Goonies meets Can't Buy Me Love). Unfortunately, Rekulak doesn't do right by his kickass female lead, Mary - and, by extension, girls and women everywhere.

Mary is a little chubby, you see, and so courting her to gain the code to show more Zelinsky's alarm system is not a job for the faint of heart. Cue the fat jokes: “She’s so fat, she shows up on radar.” “For real [...] She’s so fat, her blood type is Ragu!”; etc., etc., etc. x infinity. They're so prolific, in fact, that I came to expect an epic comeuppance for the main offenders, Billy's BFFs Alf and Clark. But the plot twist robs us of this: Mary's not fat, she's just hiding her secret teen pregnancy! Once she's given birth (and lost the baby weight, natch), it's a-okay for Billy to date her. The fat shaming wasn't wrong, just misplaced. Yuck.

While misogyny and fat shaming abound, homophobia and ableism also make appearances. Thanks to "a freakish birth defect," the fingers of Clark's left hand are fused together to form a "pincer" that's affectionately (?) known as "The Claw." While the guys just can't seem to let it go, by story's end Clark has found love in the form of Video City clerk Lynn Scott, which kinda-sorta challenges at least some of the prejudice he was forced to deal with throughout the book. In stark contrast to Mary, I should add.

As for the gay slurs, I guess we're supposed to let those slide since they come straight from the mouth of the story's baddie? Yet the language feels so randomly harsh that it seems to demand a stronger condemnation than it receives.

Idk, I really wanted to like The Impossible Fortress, but there was just so much about it that rubbed me the wrong way.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2017/02/27/the-impossible-fortress-by-jason-rekulak/ show less