Coming up with a clever, fresh idea for any novel is difficult, and genre fiction especially often runs the risk of being panned as 'too derivative.' That's why, I think, when a novel comes along that has that clever, fresh idea it's held to a higher standard by an audience ravenous for novelty. And if it doesn't meet that expectation, it gets doubly beaten down in the arena of public opinion.

'Hide' is a perfectly serviceable horror novel that very much has its finger on the pulse of a certain branch of the genre. This is a book for the audiences of 'Cabin in the Woods' and 'Squid Game.' You'll notice that these aforementioned works are a film and a series respectively. Not books. And therein lies the first problem with 'Hide.' 'Hide' is a screenplay formatted as a novel, or at least, it should have been. Everything about the way this novel was put together feels cinematic. The way it tells rather than shows, the actions that certain characters take that in writing seem unnatural and awkward but on film would have been accepted as symbolic shorthand all point to author Kiersten White being a fan of horror films. And in the vein of 'Cabin in the Woods' or 'Squid Game' this would work very well on film and have the space and the medium to pack a harder punch than it can as a novel.

In horror films, no one cares that not every character is equally fleshed out, especially if they're meant to be fodder to feed the plot, but in a novel, POV characters that we don't know or care about feel like dead weight -- a complaint found in many of the reviews of this novel posted here on goodreads.com.

And White seems to have a sense of this too because she tries vainly to give every one of the fourteen 'contestants' a back story. But when you only have 240 pages to tell your story (and honestly even if you had 1000) it just doesn't work.

That all being said, 'Hide' is still fun to read. It uses some of the tropes I really don't like (namely, the 'oh look, let's read that old notebook that spoon-feeds us the entire backstory'), but because the premise was so cool, I could look past that because I so wanted to get to run around this abandoned amusement park with the characters and hide.

The big reveal of what's going on behind the scenes is set up well enough to not feel like it came completely out of nowhere, but the hide and seek game truly is the best aspect of the novel. White does such a great job of building up the park as incredibly claustrophobic and scary, yet darkly whimsical. And following the characters around as they chose their hiding places was a lot of fun. Seeing the group dynamics develop was also interesting, even though with 14 characters to move around some of that aspect felt quite tropey.

Our main POV character, Mack, was far better developed than anyone else, and I really liked that her defining character flaw was one that was perfectly exploited by the plot for a satisfying character arc.

One of the other complaints about this book from the peanut gallery is that (certain) readers found it 'too woke.' Now, while I personally didn't have a problem with the politics of this book (and we'll get to that), there were some choice moments that were way too on the nose for even my leftist sensibilities. And it's too bad, because none of the ideas were bad ones, and could easily have been included successfully with a slightly lighter touch. As they stand, however, while I didn't find them 'too woke', I did find them 'quite cringe.'

For instance, early on in the novel, the contestants are taken to a diner, and the man running the diner is presented as your stereotypical 'boomer', making fun of one of the girls for having a food allergy, and then walking up to another and asking if she was a boy or a girl, to which the reply is: 'no one owes you their gender.' Now, if this exchange had taken place on twitter or facebook, it would have been fine, but to imagine that line being actually spoken out loud felt contrived and, yeah, cringe.

I chalk this up slightly to the age of the author. Not that all thirty-nine-year-old Millennials are just a tad removed from the current discourse, but she specifically seems to have the proximity to it to know the sentiments and the language, but lacks a degree of fluency. This is also apparent in the way she handles one of the contestants being a wannabe Instagram model. She knows enough about this world to know that Instagram models exist and sort of how that world works, but her knowledge seems peripheral which results in a sort of caricature, wherein this instagram model literally thinks about nothing else but her following and aspirations of fame and fortune. Like, color me naive, but I just have a hard time imagining a real human, instagram model or otherwise, sitting on a bus on the way to a game show and whining about not being able to livestream. Out loud. To thirteen other people.

The critique of social media in general just felt sort of preachy and disconnected from everything else going on in the plot.

And what was the plot about? Well, in the acknowledgements section at the back of the book, White tells us pretty plainly: "to everyone who still insists they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps: For fuck's sake, look up the origin of the saying."

I agree with that, actually. And if she would have just stuck to that central idea, I think the entire book would have been better, more streamlined. "I wrote Hide as a scream of rage," White said, and it shows. Even though she is on the upper and I the lower end of the Millennial age range, righteous anger is something I think everyone in our generation can understand.

Rage at being called lazy by people who created a world where most of us will never be able to own property or even earn enough to live on our own because we're all drowning in student loan debt, rage at the idea that wanting to get paid a living wage and have healthcare makes us entitled. Rage that our planet is dying under our feet and by the time we can do anything about it it'll be too late. I get it, I really do. I've felt all of those things; I think most Millennials have, and the oldest Zoomers are starting to feel it too: the squeeze of the dystopian hellscape we've all been born into.

So, sure, in the grand scheme of things, posting vapid selfies on Instagram with irony-poisoned captions or making silly little videos for TikTok about why Furries are an oppressed class isn't very meaningful, but for fuck's sake, what else do we have to get us out of bed in the morning? Existential dread?

However, when you get so caught up in that rage that radiates off in about a million different directions, it makes it hard to create a coherent through-line in a novel under 300 pages. The idea that 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' is a myth is certainly the strongest message 'Hide' has to offer, but it really does get muddied by all the competing other issues White tries to pack in. And that's too bad, because without too much re-working and just a smidge of editing to trim away the fat, that argument could have been made to feel much more convincing.

Ah, well.

I still had fun reading 'Hide' and I think anyone already on the side of its politics would enjoy it, but I don't think, unfortunately, it's well hidden enough to pull anyone else in.