Hide

Blurb: The challenge: spend a week hiding in an abandoned amusement park and don’t get caught. The prize: enough money to change everything.
Mack feels sure that she can beat her competitors. All she has to do is hide, and she’s an expert at that. It’s the reason she’s alive, and her family isn’t.
But as the people around her begin disappearing one by one, Mack realizes this competition is more sinister than even she imagined, and that together might be the only way to survive.
Fourteen competitors. Seven days. Everywhere to hide, but nowhere to run.

Author: Kiersten White
Genre: Horror
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ /5
Published: 2022

“She missed death the first time it came for her, and she was ready—maybe even eager—for it here. For that last, final, ultimate hiding place, the darkness in which no one could ever find her. Not her father, not her guilt or her shame, not hunger or fear or want.”

Here we have a Young/ New Adult horror book packaged as an adult horror book. This would have been so much better if the action had happened on page and not off page. The last 50 pages really pumped up the action and just made this book so much better! I feel like action happening off page was to help build suspense but unfortunately, it just made me feel like I was being short changed/ lacking something.

I did really enjoy the multiple perspectives. I love a book that changes POV, and I found that it was smooth changing between each character. But again this is something that only really picked up in the last 100ish pages. About half way through the book it starts moving from present to past and back again, and I really enjoyed this. However I did feel like I was invested more in the backstory than the present day plot. The backstory left me with a lot of questions and while I enjoyed being left to my own devices to decide certain elements, I do wish we had been given a lot more answers.

This was a relatively short story, 256 pages long and yet it felt so slow to get going! The first half of this book was snails pace and the second half was so fast I could barely keep up. I wish it had a smoother pacing overall, but the high pace action at the end of the book did work really well.

This book would be a good ‘gateway to horror book’, if you are not sure if you want to read horror, you could use this to test the water. Overall, I found it lacking in fear and the plot was just a bit too slow for me to feel happy with. The writing style was smooth and easy to read so it did mean I got through the book quickly, however I did find it too easy to put down and scroll my phone instead.