The challenge: Spend a week hiding in an abandoned amusement park and don't get caught. The prize: enough money to change everything. Even though everyone is desperate to win—to seize a dream future or escape a haunting past—Mack is sure 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 that this competition is even more sinister than she imagined, and that together might be the only way to survive. Fourteen competitors. Seven days. Everywhere to hide but nowhere to run. Come out, come out, wherever you are.
White is crossing over into the adult market this year, but her contemporary debut is perhaps one of the furthest from the work we’ve seen from her before. (And that’s a compliment, by the way). Hide is a dark horror story that’s full of blood, gore, and a secret society of elites murdering the young, marginalized, and poor in order to secure the success of their own families ... But though her adult debut is very much a grisly tale of horror, it also features many of the same elements that make White’s other worlds so appealing, from its fast-paced, page-turning plot to its diverse cast of memorable characters and the complex, often unlikeable heroine at its center, who is wrestling with a dark past of her own ... White skillfully balances tense group dynamics with the individual experiences of solo players, even as she interweaves snippets of the park’s dark history and the people behind its current state. Hide’s constantly shifting narrative, peppered with loads of tension and intense dread, is incredibly propulsive, and the novel’s slim page count means that no aspect of the story is wasted or feels superfluous ... The setting is deeply creepy, fully realized, and genuinely frightening at multiple points ... Hide’s ending is also intriguingly open-ended. Not in the sense that it feels like White is angling for a sequel—far from it—but more of a choose your own adventure vibe where you as the reader can decide what’s most likely to have happened on the black page after the final period.
Offers thrills and chills in equal measure ... Hide excels at balancing fast-paced plotting with precise character development, centering Mack while still delving into the lives and emotions of all 14 participants ... White's canny vision of a deadly game that pits millennials against each other and the self-indulgent families that oversee the game's completion has more on its mind than just delivering shiver-inducing horror spectacles (although it does that, too). White's atmospherically raw and psychologically complex portrayal of this sweat-inducing, muscle-clenching game engrosses readers without ever losing sight of the dark truth lurking beneath the surface: when it comes to facing the sins of the past, long-awaited reckonings make no exceptions.
Hide has the makings of a wonderfully scary tale and mostly lives up to that promise ... Hide is a fun read. White doesn’t always connect her own dots, so there are some aspects of the story that don’t make much sense, especially in the last quarter of the novel. Still, the characters are compelling, and the hide-and-seek aspect of the book is entertaining, if not exactly scary. White has a lot of good ideas that are horrific, thrilling and emotional, and this effort heralds a great new direction in her career.
