Hooked by A.C. Wise

Posted on 2 July 2022

Less than a year ago I read a dark continuation of Peter Pan in the form of Wendy, Darling by A.C. Wise. I wasn’t sure what I expected, especially as I have fond memories of the stories my mum used to make up for my siblings and me when we were much younger, of her brother Peter Pan.

Captain James Hook, the immortal pirate of Neverland, has died a thousand times. Drowned, stabbed by Peter Pan’s sword, eaten by the beast swimming below the depths, yet James was resurrected every time by one boy’s dark imagination. Until he found a door in the sky, an escape. And he took the chance no matter the cost.

Now in London twenty-two years later, Peter Pan’s monster has found Captain Hook again, intent on revenge. But a chance encounter leads James to another survivor of Neverland. Wendy Darling, now a grown woman, is the only one who knows how dark a shadow Neverland casts, no matter how far you run. To vanquish Pan’s monster once and for all, Hook must play the villain one last time…

For anyone who hasn’t read Wendy, Darling, I don’t want to go into the intricacies of the story because that would be a spoiler, and I don’t do those. But I need to mention something. This is not the Neverland that you remember, there are moments when you’ll get a glimpse of something you read in the book and it will take on a totally different, much darker, turn.

All of that having been said, the books make you pause, make you wonder if perhaps this wasn’t what Barrie was hinting at all along. Was there perhaps a much darker motive behind Peter Pan? Was he all that he seemed? The boy who never grew up?

With all these questions in my head and my frustration at the helplessness that a lack of feminine equality afforded poor Wendy Darling when she was sentenced to years in an institution because of her obsession with remembering Neverland, I started Hooked. The only things I knew were that it was a continuation of Wendy, Darling and that it focused on one of the characters that always intrigued me if not for his duality in the stage play and Peter Pan (2003), Captain James Hook.

Hook has always been an odd character, whether you’re looking at him in Hook, Peter Pan, Once Upon a Time, Pan, or any of the other screen adaptations, but this gave him an extra dimension. In Hooked we meet a man who is broken, he is lost, a man living in a London decades older than it was when he went to sea. He had a sister, she’s dead, he had friends, family. Now he has nothing, apart from his ship’s mate and doctor, Samuel.

This relationship is beautiful, you see it develop on the page, slowly, steadily. Samuel cares for James, though he can’t understand elements of his personality. But they both know there’s a limit on the time they have together, because something is coming for them.

In Wendy, Darling we saw Wendy destroy everything that gave Peter his power to ensure the safety of her daughter, but the pirates were already gone, they had already made their escape, but it wasn’t without its casualties.

This book takes place 8 years after the events in Wendy, Darling and though she is not the centre of the story this time around, Wendy has to come to terms with the realisation that she is no longer able to see the second star to the left, she has lost her right to ever visit Neverland again. This time, the saviour will be her daughter Jane, who is angry at the world, blaming her mother for the death of a close friend and devastated at what Neverland is still capable of doing to her family.

I have never been a fan of the darker side of literature, it gives me nightmares, but this twisted fairytale develops characters who were previously relatively one-dimensional. James Hook is not the heartless pirate he was made out to be while playing Peter’s sick games, constantly dying at the hands of the young boy and then forced to relive the experience over and over. He is a man who had a family, had a life, had ambitions and desires. He loves, and is in pain.

The story looks into the agonies of drug addiction as James suffers through withdrawal and relapse. He watches as the man he loves slowly dies day by day, but is unable to do anything to help him, and he barely copes with the pain of knowing that he is the cause of all of it, however unintentional it may be.

These beloved characters have become less the creations of fairytale and lighthearted joy and more real, experiencing the agony and ecstasy that real life has to offer. And due to that, it makes them more real as they go through things that everyone goes through at some point.

This book is one that I would definitely recommend, whether you like the twisted fairytale or enjoy the darker fantasy. It’s clever and emotional and deep. It makes the pirate of many childhood nightmares into a man you would probably want to give a hug.