The Hidden
Fiona Snyckers
Pan MacMillan
Review: Lauren O’Connor-May
I read this novel by Johannesburg author Fiona Snyckers with increasing levels of “what the f***?”.
I sometimes wondered; “was that intentional, why would the author do that?” The answer: it always was. Everything that I read in bewilderment, wondering if it was a writing quirk, was part of cleverly hidden plot devices building up to a huge twist, a precursor to several more.
The Hidden is narrated from several points of view. Firstly, from the inhabitants of a doomsday cult hidden in the forests of Oregon, secondly from a seemingly normal suburban family in California and finally from within the ranks of the completely fictional Domestic Terrorism Unit of the FBI.
The doomsday cult has baffled the FBI by breaking character and bombing a business park before strategically disappearing. The terrorism unit’s leader, Special Agent Aalia Knox, is under pressure and desperately searching for leads. At the same time, the heads of the family, married couple Becca and Michael, fear that their history with the cult, which they escaped as teenagers, will disrupt their lives by bringing the FBI to their doorstep.
Throughout the overarching storyline, there are hints of a dark secret, the clues of which are also cleverly disguised. By the end of this novel, I found myself frantically googling a newly discovered term that made me worry about what kind of weird stuff would pop-up on my social media feeds afterwards.
This novel is the first I have read by this award-winning author. She has seven others. In 2020 she won the South African Literary Award for best novel and the NIHSS Humanities Award for best novel for Lacuna. She has also been nominated five times for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.
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