Reviewed by Dan
TITLE: The Hike
AUTHOR: John Inman
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 219 Pages
RELEASE DATE: September 4, 2017
BLURB:
Ashley James and Tucker Lee have been friends for years. They are city boys but long for life on the open trail. During a three-hundred-mile hike from the Southern California desert to the mountains around Big Bear Lake, they make some pretty amazing discoveries.
One of those discoveries is love. A love that has been bubbling below the surface for a very long time.
But love isn’t all they find. They also stumble upon a war—a war being waged by Mother Nature and fought tooth and claw around an epidemic of microbes and fury.
With every creature in sight turning against them, can they survive this battle and still hold on to each other? Or will the most horrifying virus known to man lay waste to more than just wildlife this time?
Will it destroy Ash and Tucker too?
REVIEW:
John Inman might just be at the top of my ‘must read’ list of authors. Every book he comes out with instantly has to go on my reading list, so when The Hike hit my radar, I of course instantly added it.
As usual, the author had me laughing out loud barely two pages into the story. His portrayal of two gay men jumping around and cheering that they are going camping, put me right in the mood for the book. I loved this line, plus the mental image of the butch guy in motorcycle boots and a lumberjack shirt looking at them askance…
“we stood there in the REI parking lot jumping up and down like a couple of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. All we needed were pom-poms and tits.”
I wasn’t sure where the story would go from there. Ash and Tuck are friends who just might have had a drunken incident in Tijuana recently, and now they are off to hike three hundred miles through the deserts and mountains of the Southwest. Both are harboring feelings for the other, but neither wants to be the first to admit it. What better place to confront that than on that three-hundred-mile hike through the wilderness? And of course, neither has any experience in hiking, but what the heck…what could go wrong?
Things definitely go wrong. They will vastly over pack some items…like Spam…and vastly under pack other items like mobile power sticks. Along the way they will meet up with some colorful characters, including a book reviewer (not a very pleasant woman…I’m secretly wondering who Mr. Inman modeled her after), and a couple hermits. The story pulled me in and even though I figured out what was going on quite quickly, I think I was supposed to. I think it is all there in the blurb if you actually read it (which I didn’t, because I never do before reading the book.)
I don’t want to do any further spoilers, so I’ll just end by saying that, as usual, Mr. Inman tells an interesting story, with interesting characters. I very much enjoyed it and highly recommend it. I would say this one hit somewhere around 4.25 stars for me, but of course I’m rounding up to 4.5. 🙂
RATING: 
BUY LINKS: