"Hide:" A Labyrinth with no halls

Horror writers have always drunk greedily from the well of mythology, and with good reason. From cannibalistic wendigos to child-eating witches to the endless retinue of Judeo-Christian demons, our folklore and fairy tales are rife with classic monsters conjured from our deepest fears. Tall among these dark figures stands the minotaur with his labyrinth, a story that even in the days of its first telling must have struck a heart-stopping chord with its audience. The concept of struggling directionless through a confusing space while being hunted down by a carnivorous monster is a supremely nightmarish setup, invoking universal feelings of panic and hopelessness. So, it's unsurprising that the myth of the minotaur has been readapted continuously as part of our modern horror catalog. From the the online campfire stories of the Backrooms, Mark Danielwski's treatise on madness and obsession “House of Leaves”, and in today's subject, Kiersten White’s thriller “Hide.”

At a breezy 246 pages, “Hide” wastes no time in stating its inspiration. On the third page, White dedicates her story to “the youngest generations we’ve tasked with saving us all. You shouldn’t have to. I’m so sorry.” How better to adapt a myth about youth in ancient times being sacrificed to a monster by a governing power, than to make it about how a generation that could afford a house, lawn, and three kids on a cashiers salary fifty years ago has created a world where their grandkids literally can’t afford to live? Millennials and Generation Z are acutely aware of how our social elders, who were supposed to create a better future and carry us into it, have instead jumped onto our backs and are complaining about how slow we’re going. Rents are rising, wages are stagnant, the world is dying and we’ve all been sold out to the greed of old men signing papers in fancy rooms. A more perfect thematic translation from crusty old myth to resonant modern tale could not be conceived. And so we have our premise: 14 down-on-their-luck 20-somethings with no cash or prospects are offered a chance at big money by the mysterious “Oly-Oly-Oxen-Free Hide and Seek Tournament.” All they have to do is hide for a week in a decrepit walled-off amusement park. With two competitors discovered every day, the last one to be found will receive enough money to feed their fruitless dreams and start their lives anew. Of course it doesn’t take long for them to realize that being found means something far more dire than simply “losing the game.” Of course, the fat-cats organizing the competition are getting something more out the proceedings than simply entertainment.

So, downtrodden post-teens are being hunted down by an anonymous evil force in an abandoned amusement park at the behest of evil rich people who receive a supernatural boon from their ceremonial demises: a simple yet socially resonant update of a classic horror story everyone knows. You would think, in a post “Squid Game” world Kiersten White would have herself a recipe for success. But the thing about recipes is that you still have to cook them. While White has herself a dynamite premise, interesting themes and an attention-grabbing dedication, she has pulled mediocrity from the jaws of creativity and written a disinterested cookie-cutter campfire story off of a mythically flawless setup.

To sweep the praise out of the way, the setting of “Hide” is one of the most viscerally unnerving in recent memory. “Amazement Park” is lovingly realized in this book: a deteriorating graveyard of bygone fun turned into a monster’s hunting ground. It’s chock-full of dangerous roller coasters, sullen fun houses, and winding overgrown footpaths that leave you lost and turned around as the shadows grow long. While it would be difficult to make a decaying amusement park not eerie, White should still be commended for making “Amazement Park” such a living-dead place that the reader wants to explore and run from in equal measure. More can be said of the cast that populates the park, though less of it is good.

To begin, there is the central quartet of point-of-view protagonists. Their textual focus and innate goodness telegraph their survival from their introductions. There is sad-girl Mack whose traumatic past has left her emotionally withdrawn and saddled with survivors guilt to overcome so she can open herself up to friendship and love and yaddah-yaddah. It is a character arc that writes itself.

There is Mack’s love interest Ava, a plucky former soldier who sorta just decides to stick with Mack immediately after meeting her, creating an underdeveloped romantic bond that could have been replaced with friendship or pseudo-sisterhood to greater effect. Cynically, it comes off as if White had a contractual obligation to include a love story subplot and decided that wedging in a passionless lesbian relationship would make her characters more endearing to the young 20-something target readership she was angling to capture. Honestly, their romance is so unprompted and forgettable that its origins aren’t worth a conspiracy theory.

Moving on, there is Brandon, a human golden retriever who, like Ava, randomly decides he is friends with Mack and sticks by her for the entire book. While his angelic friendliness is meant to be endearing, he lacks all other personality traits, making him painfully one-note. Sickenly-sweet and naive beyond all rationality, Brandon, who was willing to sacrifice his life for people he had known on and off for half a week comes off as some sort of guileless alien tourist, less realistic than the carnivorous minotaur pursuing him.

Rounding out this troupe is LeGrande, a fidgety exile who only wants to use the promised prize money to rescue his disabled sister from the religious cult from which he was ejected. LeGrande is the best character. His funnily awkward mannerisms and reserved observant nature set him apart from his compatriots and his background of being brain washed, controlled, and rejected by his religion gives his self-deprecating and sacrificing attitude weight. His arc is unique and empowering as well, going from being selfless for his mission to the point of self-hate, to developing healthy selfishness and sense of self-confidence. While he isn’t a transcendent character for the ages, in a main cast of cut-out’s and caricatures, he was the only one who generated any sort of investment on my part. With the exception of LeGrande, the protagonists of “Hide” have congealed at the bottom of a tepid barrel of “meh.” But they are not what kills this book. Where the reader is let down the most is in the treatment of the horror fodder upon which our main survivors stand. If the main characters leave me feeling luke-warm, the many side characters leave me frigid.

There are ten other young men and woman dawdling around Amazement Park, serving as a roster of victims to pad out the text until it’s time for the protagonists to face the danger. Despite being meat for the grinder, these side characters aren't exactly forgettable, and many of them are actually more interesting and relatable than Mack and her friends. There is Sydney, a trend-chasing Youtube prankster in her late twenties who is desperate for views and notoriety. Ian is a wannabee writer who enjoys thinking about stories more than he does putting them to the page. Finally there is “Beautiful Ava” an aspiring beauty guru whose aloof nature and vanity are carefully constructed masks to cope with crippling doubt and a fear of being left out. Its a cast of achingly relatable side characters. So what turns them into the anchors tied to the slender neck of “Hide?” Two baked-in problems: one thematic, the other structural.

The thematic issue. For a novel whose stated purpose is to call out a generation of old fogies for foisting a shaky present with a non-existent future upon the shoulders of America’s youth, why oh why does “Hide” portray said youth as quarrelsome star-eyed dopes. Most of the contestants in the story are only poor, downtrodden, and desperate because they’re naive dreamers who lack the talent and initiative to see their own aspirations to the end. “Hide” places the onus of their lack of prospects on their shoulders rather than the glutted vultures the book says it wants to critique. This isn’t to say this cast would be better off flawless. As per the previous examples, the failings of a lot of these characters make them feel real in a deeply uncomfortable way. But the story fails to connect their hardships to the actions of the control-freak upper crusts who created the wilderness in which they struggle.

The most we get is from the main characters: Mack’s backstory of being forced to sell out her own sister to save her own skin from her murderous father, Ava’s service in the army leaving her with nothing but trauma and debts, and LeGrande’s cult giving him such a distorted view of the world where he can’t function outside of their influence. Every other contestant is so hapless and unhelpful that they ironically feel dreamt up by the book’s class of villains as strawmen: lazy youths who fail to be productive members of society yet feel entitled to success and riches. This is not helped by the palpable absence of the gamemasters who serve as the book's nominal target of ridicule. Only the affluent old matron who runs the game maintains any presence in the story, while all the other old money mooks who gain vague success and power by sacrificing young folk to an eldridge beast remain conspicuously off the page, unseen and therefore unexamined. Towards the end of the novel, it’s revealed that the contestants are actually distant relations of the old-money families that run the death game and that the nondescript success granting magic generated by the ceremony comes from these rich folk regularly sacrificing members of their bloodlines to the minotaur in Amazement Park. It’s an apt capitalist metaphor, the well-to-do exploiting the desperation of others to kick the can of consequences down the road and save themselves, but it misses the real-world reality that the upper classes aren’t simply opportunists trying to save themselves, they go out of their way to make the lives of others worse so they can better exploit them. Things are already good for them, they just want to enhance it by making things worse for everyone else, which is reflected nowhere in the text. The book’s base premise is a fantastical analogy for real-world social issues, but it's a skeleton without any muscles, connective tissue between the core ideas of the text and the text itself never fully grown. White simply plops her message at our feet like a cat with a dead bird, and since that message is diametrically opposed to how the characters of the novel are portrayed, “Hide” ends up thematically snapping its own neck and slumping to the floor without discussing any point in depth.

The second issue is structural. I meant it when I said that a lot of the side characters are achingly relatable, but, like cardboard cutouts in a movie theater lobby, they mostly serve as pretty flat planks promising more than they provide. As relatable as they are, the minotaur has to kill somebody and it isn’t going to be our main group. So they all die, alone, off screen, and most damnably of all, usually in the same chapter in which their perspective is introduced to the reader. The bulk of the book is spent on a plodding carousel of wasted potential: a side character is given the focus, we learn their motives, flaws, and backstory in small isolated vignette, we grow to care about them, and then they are eaten by the minotaur. This structure would be a compelling, albeit emotionally manipulative, narrative device if it wasn’t repeated nine times in a row with characters more interesting than the non-disposable protagonists.

A thriller needs bodies to stack but the most effective horror comes from tragedy, and when we are not allowed to care about the people who are dying, all the air is sapped from the sails of the story’s fear factor. At most, they are only ever allowed to be interesting, but since they are killed in the same breath as they are introduced, the side characters’ demises never add anything to the narrative. We don’t care about Mack and company avenging their fallen brethren because the plot never allotted opportunities for their competitors to get close to either them or us. The most that is provided is a side plot where Beautiful Ava, the fashion guru, second-guesses her choice to not join Mack’s troupe of misfits and gets off her high horse to accept that she is not exceptional. But she dies before her arc can even be realized. I suppose there is a tragedy in unachieved growth, but in this case that tragedy doesn’t translate to horror, it translates to disappointment.

And let's not forget that “Hide” is a very economical novel. At 240 pages it can be read in one sitting, which is good for a thriller but a death blow for this particular story structure. The majority of the story is spent in this literal death spiral of side characters being given the focus, dying, and Mack and friends suspecting there is something off about this whole competition. By the time we exit this plot cul-de sac and the heroes realize the true gravity of their situation, most everybody else is dead and the book’s more than half over. As a result, “Hide” is an aggressively linear book, stagnating in a cycle of killing off less important characters before running out of meat.

Moving on, almost begrudgingly, as there is no other choice, the novel then provides a fake-out death, a self-sacrifice, a successful escape, confronting the villain and then defeating them. It feels as if there are only ten plot points in the entire story, and to add to the mood-killing redundancy of how the side characters are dealt with, since the protagonists are so separated from the rest of the cast for the majority of the book, towards the end they are forced to rediscover the same pieces of plot-relevant lore that the reader was made privy to earlier in the death episodes of the less important contestants.

Compare the endless back and forth marching of “Hide” to another horror take on the myth of Theseus: Chris Pasetto and Christian Cantamessa’s graphic novel “Kill the Minotaur.” A more direct adaptation of the original myth, deconstructing the concept of heroism with a minor sci-fi kick, “Kill the Minotaur” uses its few pages more thoughtfully. Both the cast and narrative are dynamic: characters team up, betray each other, plan and fail and try again, lose faith in their friends, gain faith in strangers, fall to madness, gain clarity, attempt to escape, fight each other, succeed and suffer, sacrifice and die pointlessly.

As I read “Hide” I found myself wishing that these characters would wise up to their situation earlier on, maybe have our heroes and some side characters team up and work together to escape, fail, and maybe end up turning against each other in an attempt to survive and appease their captors. Such a plot would give their eventual escape and revenge more meaning, rather than having our heroes break out on their first serious try. I suppose its easy for me to come up with a story that I would personally have enjoyed more. Almost as easy as it was for White to come up with a story that does nothing with itself at all. We are left with a bright plastic whistle of a book that makes a loud racket with no melody or meaning.

When I slid “Hide” across the bookstore counter to the cashier, her face immediately lit up with approval. She gave me a knowing smirk and informed me that I had made a good choice of my summer read and that “Hide” had been one of the scariest books she had ever read. Looking back, and with all due respect, I am forced to wonder if it was the only scary book she had ever read. “Hide” is not deserted of worth. Its characters are relatable, its premise is brilliant, its setting evocative, and the ending of the novel itself is so satisfying, visceral, and karmic that it's nearly enough to mask the shallow nature of the preceding narrative. Nearly. “Hide” talks a big game but when the race starts, the novel veers of the track, goes to the park, gets an ice cream, and strolls leisurely down the scenic route to the finish line while everyone else is collecting their medals. It refuses to commit to anything whole-heartedly, whether it be it’s theming or characters resulting in a book that peaks in its premise and thinks value stated is value provided. “Hide” is a maze devoid of branching paths, straightforward and vacuous. It’s not boring or frustrating, just empty, which for any story, let alone a horror story, is far worse.