Hide by Kiersten White

Hide is the first adult horror foray by Kiersten White, to be released in May this year. 

Kirsten White impressed me with her historical YA book series, "And I Darken" a couple of years back and so I jumped onto this one, her first adult book with supernatural horror elements. The premise was absolutely gob-smacking - an abandoned amusement park and fourteen contestants in a game of hide-and-seek. Except that if you are found, then it is game over. Like literally so :) 

Anyways - first things first, was the book great and live up to the expectations? No. It didn't. It pains me to say so, because the premise and even the execution was terrific. But I just couldn't get to like the characters and so wasn't practically living in their heads, in all those moments of absolute terror as they find out the truth about this hide-and-seek game. And in such a horror themed novel, unless the lead is likeable (like a gritty, clever heroine) we typically don't tend to enjoy the rest of that splatter-punk. 

Well, to be fair, this didn't turn out to be a splatter-punk either. In fact, despite the potential to be a runaway freight-train, Kiersten chooses to unpack her plot slowly, almost thoughtfully. It isn't until three-fourth of the novel in, that we actually get to the real 'supernatural' elements and the horror is revealed. 

So the wafer-thin plot is thus: Mack, a survivor of a serial killing (where her entire family gets killed by her own deranged father) is invited to be part of this weird game, where all they have to do is to keep hiding through the day and the last surviving person, who has not been found out after a week, will be walking away with that cash prize of fifty grands. Naturally, what would make the set up interesting is the mix of characters in this game. A-la Tournament! And it is also absolutely essential for the reader to like the main character (Here: Mack, because most of the game unfolds mainly from her POV)

But Kiersten chooses to use all her characters sparingly, giving us a limited peek-boo into their heads as the game proceeds. Which means, lesser time and lesser character development. Which in a way, was going to be okay because we know, ultimately only two or three of them are going to make it to that last day/level. So Mack is actually a very lost soul. After having gone through a debilitating accident in her childhood, her perception of people is heavily skewed. Due to her extreme PTSD and guilt in having lost her sister to that deranged killing episode and this character-flaw is a recurring theme in the story, where Mack is reluctant to get close to anyone else. And in any 'game' such as these, we know forming strategic alliances is the way to survive. 

One of the first players, she meets is Anna, an amputee and a war-veteran dealing with her own version of PTSD and loss. She immediately is drawn to Anna but cannot bring to bridge the gap and slay her demons in her head. The third main character was LeGrand, a boy-man dealing with separation and loss in his own way, brought up in a fucked-up cult in an isolated mountain. There are scores of others : A good cross-section of the society, from the self-obsessed Instagram influencer, to the miserable writer looking for his great idea, to the gym-freak with self-esteem issues and lots more. But in such a setting, we know most of these folks are going to get bumped off, one after the other. 

The plot twist and the big reveal happens around the mid-way mark but by then, I had frankly lost interest in how the survivors were going to make it out. The writing is solid but the plot and the characters were not that appealing to me. 

The author herself reveals that this book was inspired by the Minotaur theme and Kiersten also thoughtfully inserts the theme of socio-political divides into the story ( where the competitors are mostly desperately poor, looking to score big with this win and the organisers are the rich, snobbish apathetic members of the affluent society) Despite having a fabulous premise, Hide didn't turn out to be super exciting. Fans of horror-movies, might identify and like the plot, but personally, this didn't work for me.