Blog Tours,  Reviews

Blog Tour: Hide – Kiersten White

Looking for a compelling horror novel that reads like the fun slasher flicks of the early 2000s? Look no further. Hide is Kiersten White’s addictive and fun adult debut, with an intriguing concept and a lot of death. In short, it’s exactly what is needed for a fun read in the sun or cuddled up inside with a good drink right now.

Huge thanks to Marie-Louise at Del Rey for inviting me on the Blog Tour and sending me an ARC of Hide. All opinions are my own.

RELEASE DATE: 24/05/2022

STAR RATING: 4/5 ✶

SUMMARY: 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. (from Del Rey)

OPINIONS: I had so much fun with this book! It is not the most structurally sound or logical novel out there – but it doesn’t have to be. It is compelling and entertaining and I read it in a single sitting, which makes it the perfect summer read. Whether you like to read in the sunshine in a park, on holiday or cosied up at home with a cold drink, this is the ideal sort of book to read as it’s warm outside – it’s spooky, it distracts you and it chills you down to the bone – but it’s not nightmare-inducing-fucked-up-scary.

It’s got everything for a great read – mainly, a strong setting, interesting characters and a creepy mystery. I loved the setting in a derelict amusement park – having seen images from old parks that have been abandoned for decades, I can imagine the spooky atmosphere being there must evoke, so it’s the perfect setting for a horror novel. Having a hide-and-seek competition with little information as the hook is classic for the genre. It makes no logical sense that any of the characters would take the bait so easily, but that is the fun of it. You as the reader know from the start that there is something very fishy going on and it’s a train wreck about to happen – and you just can’t look away. You want to scream at the characters to get out of there as the tension rises, and then the first person dies, and you know that your gut instincts are right.

But the compelling part is not that characters die, but figuring out why they disappear and what is behind these events. In classic horror flick fashion, the reader knows more than the characters as the story unravels, and you just can not look away. While this is a horror novel, it is also an entertaining book, think Final Destination rather than The Ring. So if you enjoy a little bit of a scare, do give this a read and join Mack and her friends in hiding…

Add Hide to your Goodreads here, and order a copy via Bookshop here (affiliate link).

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: