#Spooktober ‘Hide’ by Kiersten White

About the book….

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 their dream futures or escape their haunting pasts–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.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

‘Hide’ was published by Del Rey and Penguin Random House in August ’22, and pardon the pun, it’s one hell of a fun ride!
Dark and twisty like a haunted rollercoaster, this takes Mack, as a central narrator, a girl with no family, no future and a past she is running away from, and plunges her head first in the opportunity of her lifetime. Or her death time.

Mack is aspiring to anonymity. She lives in a homeless centre, with no foundations and a barely hinted at past. Given no chance other than to say ‘yes’ to the Ox Extreme Sports competition , where the winner takes it all. Except-there is no phone service, no way out of the fun fair , a water tight NDA to sign before participating, and a rag tag bunch of wannabes, has beens and ever weres about to lose themselves in a haunted funfair.

But as each competitor is slowly revealed, do they all have what it takes to win? And just who would they throw under a bus to get there? And what’s with the highy suspicious disappearance of personal belongings, the creepy support staff (hello Linda and Gary!) and the way they sugarcoat what is a very creepy theme park, built on a highly toxic piece of land?

Why was it abandoned in the first place?

And what made the producers pick it in the first place?

The creepy introduction makes it sound like the underbelly of every theme park you have ever been to, it’s instantly relatable for the urban myths that surround it -we live down the rbakers dowzenoad from one very much like it,a sea front amusement park , with peeling paint, terrifying carousel horses and the site of several deaths….-and it draws you. Once the scene is set and the characters introduced, you are hooked. And whilst we spend a little time with each of them, Mack is the heart of the story and Mack is the one you are rooting for. Partly because you know you want her to stay around long enough to tell her tale and partly because you know she has a good heart and will help save some of the others who you just know will land themselves in peril.

A faceless corporation.

A baker’s dozen contestants with nothing to lose.

A contestant who wants the prize money in order to hide herself forever.

A haunted funfair.

And some very eerie, creepy goings on….

Hide is a mystery wrapped in a horror tale with some unsettling shenanigans that will make you jump. It is the right length, I think, for this story, because at 236 pages, the suspense can be maintained and the plot reveals are often ‘blink and you miss’ them. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope you will too!

About the author…