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One of my all-time favorite tropes are games, or competitions, so when I heard the synopsis for Kiersten White's Adult Debut, Hide, I instantly added it to my TBR. Other novels include Mooncranker's Gift (1973) (winner of the Heinemann Award), Stone Virgin (1985), and Losing Nelson (1999). He counts William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers as his major influences.

Hide by Kiersten White: 9780593359259 | PenguinRandomHouse

Among the good things—Ms. Clark started with a plan, plotted it out, and followed the plan and outline and too the reader to the conclusion. Things moved in sequence, without any obvious temporal contradictions. She managed to convey some identity regarding her characters. (Though generally nowhere near enough.) I love a good horror book. I love being scared by them. This book has an underlying dread which really helped amp up the anxiety and tension for me. The setting is deeply creepy, fully realized, and genuinely frightening at multiple points (I can’t be the only person who hates clowns). White’s descriptions of some of the decaying and overgrown attractions are hauntingly effective, as players hide in hollowed-out carousels, decrepit roller coasters, and giant swings with broken chains that limply sway like hanks of hair. There are warped carnival prizes collapsing games tents and undergrowth so dense there are places it’s impossible to see through. In short: This place is terrifying and would have been equally so without the addition of a slightly demonic supernatural element. OMG the ARC for this is on its way to me. i might have to get covid again so i can curl up with it uninterrupted.A teacher and a novelist, Unsworth worked as a lecturer in English at Norwood Technical College, London, at University of Athens for the British Council, at University of Istanbul,Turkey for British Council, lived as a Writer in residence, Liverpool University, England, and also at Lund University, Sweden. He was a teacher at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, 1999. The atmosphere in the abandoned theme park was creepy as hell, and I thought the slow reveal of the baddie was well done for ultimate tension.

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I had been eagerly awaiting this book, and unfortunately for me, it was not the book I was expecting. This novel will have widespread appeal, but it employs a genre/trope that I don't like and so I was disappointed once I got midway through and figured out what was going on. Spoilers (but not major ones) below: To start out with, there are WAY too many characters (fourteen!) to keep straight. They are first and often identified by their "identities"-ie "intern" "writer" etc. Then we get names and identities sometimes used interchangeably. When I got to the middle of the book, I wished I would have kept a chart from the beginning, but in the end many of the characters were totally throwaway so it didn't really matter. huh? i thought i was getting a mindless splatter-romp through an amusement park like FantasticLand, where—if there was any attempt at a social message it was buried beneath a heap of body parts. The writing was a little wonky for me from the very start, but I was intrigued to see where it was going regardless.

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innocent childhood game given a horror movie coating, sinisterizing the phrase "come out, come out, wherever you are..." however, despite my apprehension about its supernatural foes and societal woes, i was completely won over. the social commentary wasn't too heavy-handed and was well-integrated into the architecture of the story, and the beastie proved just as good as a human adversary at satisfying my bloodthirsty little readersoul. it helped that—precision be damned—i just pictured the red bull from The Last Unicorn.

The Hide by Barry Unsworth | Goodreads The Hide by Barry Unsworth | Goodreads

I was expecting a straightforward mystery/adventure/thriller. What I got was half thriller, half paranormal supernatural gobbledygook. Then there’s locale. The setting for Ms. Clark’s novel is Chicago. A city well-known to its several million inhabitants, at least modestly well-known by many more who have traveled and vacationed there, and even known at some superficial level by those who’ve seen Chicago’s streets, shops, skyline, downtown, and more in innumerable television shows, movies, video games, etc. Freud, Civilization and Its DiscontentsJosh, or Josiah, is a 20-year-old lower-class youth, working “on the stalls” at an amusement arcade in what reads like Brighton. An innocent, he latches on to Mortimer, an older and seemingly wiser man with whom he works, forming an odd and sometimes queer friendship with him. When Mortimer speaks of sex and class and the revolution and the bourgeoisie, the naive Josiah—who often asks “What’s your terms?” to get Mortimer’s use of vocabulary correct—begins to take on this man’s beliefs as his own. Overall: with less characters, this would be so much fun but it was still great try and I enjoyed it till the end. I hope Kiersten White writes more adult horror novels. She absolutely killed it! I read the original version of Hide last year when it released, and while I enjoyed it, I remember thinking it had a lot of facets that didn't translate well to a written novel and would have worked better in a visual medium, like a film or mini-series—or, lo and behold, a graphic novel!

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I actually was expecting something different to this when I went into it, some more horror and less adventure. Not that there isn't horror and gore of course, and the monster too, but it wasn't what I expected. Overall, this was a pretty good story - The characters could have been less flat and the book could have been edited to reflect more current technology The gardens of the state are a fecund wilderness, Eden after the Fall, whose plant and bird life are described in detail by the observant Simon. Simon lives with his dominant sister Audrey whose dead husband had owned the house and estate. Also resident as an unpaid servant is Marion, a young relative of Audrey’s dead husband. The employment of Josh as a gardener sets in play a series of events culminating in disaster. This one was full of tension, without making me terrified. You know things are going to go wrong and the author keeps you in the dark until the end when the motivations are revealed. There are quite a few characters to keep up with and two characters named Ava! Why?!

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Hide” is, I hope, Tracy Clark’s first novel. I’d hate to think she’d published one and hadn’t since received some useful critique about how to make ‘em better; there are some good things about this one, but there are lots of shortcomings, too. Is it a perfect book? No. But it's an easy read with a unique concept, interesting characters, a creepy atmosphere, and social commentary sprinkled on top. I kept pausing my work to read a few more chapters because I needed to know how it ended!

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Simon is a forty-something-year old neurotic effete: over-educated and under-socialized. Living on the grounds of his widowed sister Audrey’s massive estate, he has acclimated to life by burrowing underground, creating what he terms his “hide.” Some of Unsworth’s most stunning descriptions in this book of landscape and distance can be found in Simon’s sections, and, admittedly, it’s unclear just how skillfully Simon has constructed his hideaway or if it’s just merely a series of bushes and fences. From here, he moves about the estate, surveilling and watching neighbors and also the social gatherings of his sister’s theatre group—distanced, remote, but judgmental: “Why should I always be on the outside of everything, appreciating my exclusion with an aesthetic ache?” Also, in the author's note she mentions something about this being a treatise about race/class/whatever. Nah, it doesn't even come close to going there.