Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak

My niece and I have a little tradition. A couple of years ago we discovered we were both, independently, obsessed with Freida McFadden novels. So we started our own two-person book club, conducted entirely over text message. In the past we would have talked in person, but time and geography has changed that. 

Recently my niece recommended Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak.

The novel follows Mallory, a young woman in recovery from addiction, who takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy family in the New Jersey suburbs. She’s looking for a fresh start and a quiet summer. What she gets instead is a five-year-old whose drawings start out as ordinary kid stuff: stick figures, houses, suns with little rays, and slowly and unsettlingly evolve into something much darker and more specific than a child that age should be capable of imagining. 

My niece and I spent an embarrassing number of texts debating what was actually going on with Teddy’s drawings, whether it was supernatural, psychological, or something else entirely. That uncertainty is really what drives the book, and it kept us guessing far longer than we expected.  

On their own, out of context, they’d look like nothing, just a kid’s scribbles. But placed exactly where they are in the narrative, each one lands like a gut punch. It’s a small formal trick, but it does a lot of heavy lifting for the atmosphere of the book, and it’s not something either of us had seen done quite this way before. We started out with what we thought would be a fun, twisty, McFadden-adjacent read, and left pleasantly surprised by how much more was underneath it. It’s tense, it’s genuinely creepy in places, and it has a real emotional core in Mallory’s own journey that gives the thriller elements something to stand on. If you’re a fan of psychological suspense with an unusual visual gimmick that actually pays off, this one is well worth the read.