It seems that Kiersten White is a prolific YA novelist and this 2022 novel for Del Rey is her debut as an adult author. That makes sense because it still carries a YA feel. It's a short, quick read at only two hundred and forty pages. Most of the characters are young adults, not teenagers but young men and women in their early twenties still struggling to find their places in the world. I could see plenty of opportunity for more adult content, not least because this is a horror novel in which a lot of people die, but the author keeps both sex and violence minimised. I liked it but I have questions and I wanted a lot more of everything.

The first note to make is that the opening chapter is very tasty indeed. In keeping with the low page count, it's done and dusted in only two of them, but it's a perfect background, recounting the rise and fall of the Amazement Park, opened in 1953 and closed in 1974 after the murder of a five-year-old girl. Reading it again after finishing the book makes it even more powerful, as it adds impact with the benefit of hindsight. And then White dives quickly into the modern day to explain the rules of the game and get her story into motion.

There's a company called Ox Extreme Sports and they're hosting the Olly Olly Oxen Free Hide-and-Seek Tournament, an event that happens every seven years. Fourteen contestants are sent into the abandoned and now overgrown Amazement Park for a game of hide and seek over the duration of seven days. Each day, two contestants are found and eliminated until there's only a winner, who will take home $50,000 in prize money. Every one of this year's fourteen could do a lot with that money, including the primary character, Mackenzie Black, who the invite finds in a shelter.

Needless to say, there isn't a lot of character development for many of these contestants. There simply isn't room for it in a two-hundred and forty-page novel, thus underlining one reason why I wanted more. More pages, more character development, even for the two eliminated after a single day. We get to know Mack pretty well and I had a lot of sympathy for her. She accepts the invite because she's a natural; she's been hiding all her life and once literally played for those stakes. She's outed soon enough at Amazement Park as the sole survivor of the Hide and Seek Massacre, in which her father killed everybody else in his household with a knife. She still feels guilt for causing her little sister's death by stealing her favourite hiding spot.

I can mention her because she's the primary character from the outset but mentioning anyone else could inherently count as a spoiler, because we only get to know the characters who live the longest. Maybe I can mention Ava, an army veteran, who connects strongly with Mack; LeGrand, who was banished from his Mormon fundamentalist family, something that plays into the story in ways I completely failed to expect—he arguably has the best story arc; and Jaden, an asshole YouTube prankster, who's the character we're happiest to hate from the very beginning. He has every intention of teaming up with other competitors who he'll promptly betray.

One of the aspects worthy of praise here is that, even though few of these contestants have any real substance, they're highly varied in sympathy. This is a horror novel, so it's no spoiler to say that this game doesn't unfold entirely as advertised, and that makes this "dark supernatural thriller" comparable to a slasher movie. I've seen my fair share of them and I typically despise all the characters equally and end up rooting for the slasher whittling down their numbers. The fun is often in picking out which one I want to die next.

That's just not the case here. I liked some of the characters a lot and others a little. Some were annoying early but grew on me as the game ran on. Some I didn't particularly like at all but had sympathy for nonetheless. Others I'd love to see hacked to bits in a slasher movie, even though the author resists that level of gore. And I'm just talking about the competitors here. There are other characters in the book, albeit not many of them, and they have their parts to play too. My note about wanting more applies to the gore, but even more to the non-competitors. There's a story behind this competition, of course, but we read about it in diaries rather than from those actively making it happen and that's a lost opportunity.

Obviously, I can't talk about that story because it would spoil the entire book, but I can say that it's built around the myth of the Minotaur. The Amazement Park has a mazelike design and the character doing the seeking in this organised game of hide and seek takes the Minotaur role. I liked this approach and, for the most part it's structurally sound. However, I have a major issue with the logic that not only isn't addressed in the book but is deliberately ignored to make this whole thing possible. It's particularly annoying that I can't talk about it here. Let's hint at it by comparing it to an earlier review and suggesting that this is very much 'You Better Watch Out' by James S. Murray & Darren Wearmouth, with the mythology angle replacing Christmas.

Beyond that, it becomes a story about privilege and perhaps class, so there's a tiny bit of 'They Live' in here. "We all sell out every day," Buck Flower told us in that movie. "Might as well be on the winning team." That applies here, though its sources are much older, of course, going back to antiquity. There's a little bit of 'Lord of the Flies' too, as a game of hide and seek transforms into a game of survival; of course, given the setting, maybe I should say 'FantasticLand' instead. Either way, that doesn't go too far because the story unfolds in a much briefer timeframe and, once again, there aren't enough pages to do that angle justice.

At the end of the day, this is a short but fast-paced ride of a book. I devoured it in an evening in two chunks and made serious headway in another novel, too. However, its flaws are all inherent in that length. Throughout this review, I've suggested examples of what it could have done in a longer format. At four hundred pages, White could have set everything up with more patience, deepened her characters and expanded the story behind the story. The bones are all here, but the meat not so much.

And, talking of meat, her history with YA may have unwittingly lessened the impact of this book by restricting it from adult themes. There isn't much need for sexual content in this story, but it would have upped the stakes a little, reminding us that the competitors are adults looking for a step up in life rather than fourteen-year-olds in twenty-four-year-old bodies. There's far more opportunity for gore, but the Minotaur equivalent shows up frustratingly rarely and much of what he does is kept offscreen and out of focus. The decision to stay YA in an adult novel makes this feel like a gory horror movie that's been cleaned up for family viewing on an aeroplane. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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