It’s been ages since I had a good bit of size-warping fiction to write up, or even just to add to my list of giant women in mainstream literature, but I was delighted to recently discover The Hike by Drew Magary, a surreal contemporary fantasy that borders on horror, recommended by a certain “PapaB” on Eka’s Portal. Well, I was part delighted and part shocked I hadn’t come across this before: it’s a novel from 2016 that proved very popular, and it has one of the most robust depictions of a man-eating giantess that I’ve come across in mainstream fiction.
What’s It All About
This is a hard book to pin down as it’s something of a genre-blend and even within its own world the rules keep changing; it’s a dreamlike journey concerning hapless Ben who, taking a break from a business trip for a walk in the mountains, wanders into an increasingly odd, frightening other world.
The premise is simple: he must follow the path through various unpredictable trials and tribulations (the less you know about these surprises the better), and along the way he encounters psychotic killers, weird monsters and an ever-shifting landscape. It’s a mad, fast ride that’s fun in its own right, but especially appealed to me for one particular obstacle: the man-eating giant.
Who is the Man-Eating Giant in The Hike?
Perhaps midway through the book, if not a little earlier, Ben comes to the most drawn-out challenge of his journey, when he reaches the lair of a giant. He is captured there, threatened, and spends a while in the giant’s company before finally escaping to continue his journey – so there’s a healthy dose of interaction and she comes back later.
This is a female giant, described as beautiful: Fermona is a thirty-foot woman with red hair, dressed like a savage. And she has a wonderfully bubbly personality, at once charmingly friendly and candidly murderous. She’s also only eats people, and, for once in a story, this giant actually does eat them. I can count all of about two books where a female giant is shown actually devouring a victim, but in this case she talks about it all the time, has a stew constantly on the go and, SLIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD, bites off one man’s head and swallows a vampiric creature whole.
Granted, it is still brief and not the sort of victim-squirming eat-them-alive fare you’d mostly find in my own work, but the concept itself is at least given a lot of space, overall.
Fermona is also splendidly callous in her manner, cheerily looking out for her victims whilst never flinching from the idea that she’s going to eat the people she’s befriended. We get some interaction from her picking up characters a few times, too, and though these moments are fleeting it’s a lot more than I expect from most books, which typically breeze over giants in an instant.
The book itself is a unique and erratic journey that’s bound to divide readers, but I found it highly enjoyable, an easy read, and a great example of a man-eating giant. Though, of course, as is always the way of such things, I could’ve gone for more, more, more…
If you want more yourself and haven’t seen my list of giantesses in fiction, check it out – and if you’ve come across others that I don’t have on there, let me know! (Seriously, considering this one went under my radar for so long, despite the amount I read, I bet there’s tons of great sizey books out there I don’t know about.)
