Hide: The book you need after Squid Game

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The premise of the story is frighteningly simple: fourteen contestants are dropped off in an abandoned amusement park for a game of extreme hide-and-seek that promises fame and a fifty thousand dollar cash prize for the winner. Sometimes the dialog of said wealthy elites was a LITTLE on the nose (which was a bit surprising as this is marketed as an adult novel; I tend to expect more of that in YA, but hey, this is White’s first foray into adult audiences and perhaps some old habits die hard), but it was few and far between and never took me too far out of the story. I imagine the monster to have the body of the demogorgon from Stranger Things along with horns and a gaping black hole for a mouth - the monster was ambiguous and creepy, a walking horror it sounded like.

Overall, I had no difficulty in reading this one as I was very curious about how everything would come together but it never quite reached the potential that I was hoping for. Equal parts hell-ride thriller and American fable, Kiersten White’s Hide runs you through a sinister child’s game set in a nightmare amusement park, and it does so with gleeful, fiendish delight. Hunger Games has absolutely nothing on this but saying that if you love the Hunger Games you’ll adore this book. Haunting, startling, unrelenting, and unexpectedly heartbreaking, Hide draws you inexorably in among the thorns and rust, where the monsters are both intimately familiar and horrifyingly unfathomable.Our primary POV character is Mackenzie “Mack” Black, recruited from the homeless shelter where she’s been staying since she lost her job. In short: This place is terrifying and would have been equally so without the addition of a slightly demonic supernatural element. I really liked the slow build up, as each day passes we see various players start to drop out of the game, with insights into the moments leading up to their ‘loss’ that start innocuous but then turn more and more sinister as the story goes on. Only Linda seemed passionate about keeping open the connection to the monster and the others seemed impassive; I like to think they were riding on her coattails for the profit but if it were up to them, they would have closed the portal. Suspenseful and compelling, Hide is a rewarding slow burn mystery with a fun horror twist that you can’t put down.

No Place to Hide" by Ruth Searle is a riveting psychological thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat. And while Kiersten White has been more in Serena’s genres of fantasy and historical fiction, she has dabbled in horror now and again.Thank you, Penguin Random House Canada, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

For example, how the park was described created an elaborate visual for me and I was able to use it to bounce from place to place as the story continued.I had a blast re-visiting this story and I highly recommend picking up a copy of this graphic novel for your summer horror reading, whether you've read the original novel or not. It didn’t add value to her character or the story in my opinion because it was just such a quick “Oh she acts this way because __________ happened to her”.