A review by coralinejones
Hide by Kiersten White

dark medium-paced

2.25

Not great. Fun premise, though:

A group of young adults play an intense game of hide-and-seek in an abandoned amusement park for a large sum of money. They have 7 days to do so and slowly things begin to get creepier and more eerie, the entire game falling apart around them.

"Hide" reminded me a bit of "Battle Royale" and "The Hunger Games" just not as scary, not as iconic, and while saying absolutely nothing. There were too many characters to follow, some better than others, but all being kind of dull and not very interesting to read about after their initial introduction. We didn't get any real backstory or depth for any of the 14, even the main character (who we, at least, know a smidge about in comparison to the other 13), and that ruined a bit of the story for me as well as I couldn't make any emotional attachments to the cast.

I think the whole thing started to fall apart in the middle. It began reading too much like a YA novel.

You'd think with this "fight to the death" / "fight to win" trope we often see in horror like this, it would be a lot... Scarier? Bloodier? I mean "The Hunger Games", a series written for young adults, felt more like a horror series and it's officially marked as a Sci-Fi Dystopian. There was literal body gore in those books. This, a horror book made for adults, had nothing but a bunch of references to pee, a random bit of homophobia, and loads of potential.