By Meghan Mazzaferro
Content warning: suicide, blood, death, violence, homophobia, racism, classism, child abuse, gun violence, grief, confinement, death of an animal, injury detail
Hide, by Kiersten White, is an adult horror novel in which fourteen people are given the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to compete in a high-stakes game of hide and go seek in an abandoned amusement park with a $50,000 prize. For Mack, this offer is life-changing, and even though entering this game brings her back to the darkest time of her life, she’s willing to do whatever she has to win. She’s an expert at hiding, and this time her life doesn’t depend on it‒or does it?
I’ll preface this review by saying that this is my first experience reading horror. I consider myself a bit of a coward, and I wanted to push myself outside of my comfort zone with this book. How could I resist a horror novel set in an abandoned amusement park? While I was nervous for the first couple of pages, I have to say I loved this book! I connected quickly with several of the characters and was constantly guessing and trying to put the puzzle pieces together. Several times, I thought I knew where the story was going, but I was almost always wrong, or at least missing one crucial piece of information. This book was a fun, spooky ride, and while I’ll admit I was never genuinely scared, I was on the edge of my seat and glued to the page.
Once again, I’m unfamiliar with the conventions of the genre, so I can’t speak to what has or hasn’t been done before, but I found this book excelled as a character study. Mack is our primary protagonist, but many of the competitors get developed as we spend time in their minds during the game. We learn their motivations, why they are the way that they are, and what led them to enter this competition. While many of the characters explored in this book are imperfect, with quite a few being antagonists or even villains, seeing into their minds gave the story a level of emotional depth that I appreciated.
The setting is immersive and richly described, and the story moves quickly (the book is only 250 pages). I enjoyed White’s writing style, with third-person narration that occasionally jumped between characters and revealed pieces of the mystery that kept me tense and anxious for the entire length of the story. There were a few instances where a character came into an item that provided lots of information to them and to the reader, and while it did feel exposition-heavy in those instances, it also felt necessary for either the reader to understand the stakes that the characters didn’t yet realize, or to catch the characters up on what the reader had come to suspect. While I don’t think this writing style will work for everyone, I enjoyed it.
The actual horror component of this book, the dark purpose of the amusement park and the game of hide and seek, was really interesting. While it could be considered a fairly standard convention of the genre (I think? Again, I avoid horror like an abandoned amusement park), I found that the driving motivations of the story’s villains were well-explained (but not justified!), which made the story emotionally relevant for today’s political climate. This book touches on racism, homophobia, classism, and more, as well as exploring themes of trauma, PTSD, and finding community, and I feel like each of these topics was well-handled in a novel of this length.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I enjoyed the suspense and thrills, appreciated that I was never genuinely scared, and was pleasantly surprised by the depth and complexity of the story’s main characters.
Thank you, Penguin Random House Canada, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.