Hide: The Graphic Novel by Scott Peterson and Kiersten White
Ten Speed Graphic (September 2023)
240 pages; $24.95 paperback
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Kiersten White is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning, and critically acclaimed author of many books, including The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, the And I Darken trilogy, the Slayer series, the Camelot Rising trilogy, and her adult debut, Hide. Kiersten lives with her family in San Diego, where they obsessively care for their deeply ambivalent tortoise, Kimberly. Her novel, Hide, was recently adapted to graphic novel format by Scott Peterson.
I was intrigued to read this graphic novel as a reviewer, as I have never read the original novel. Adaptations between mediums get a bad rap, especially between similar mediums like novels and graphic novels. There are a lot of arguments, with many valid examples, on both sides that adaptations between these two genres lose something. I wanted to see if that was true, and if I could tell what that was as a reviewer.
Hide is based around the idea of a creepy, abandoned theme park. There is a theme park that’s fear/horror related. There are no maps, no guide posts, simply a maze of thrills and entertainment. At one point, a child goes missing. An employee is blamed and the park shutters. Come modern day, an orphan living in a shelter who simply needs some good luck and a fresh start enters a contest to survive a hide-and-seek style competition with a prize of $50,000 on the line. She and thirteen others enter the competition and spend a week in the ruins, getting found one by one. Only there’s something else happening, something they’re not being told. There are signs and hints of something worse happening, some deal made years and years ago with some creature that has recently woken.
As a graphic novel, this was a perfectly solid YA-level horror. The characters are appealing as misfits and outsiders, and their language and attitudes towards the world, social media, etc. Their approaches to the competition, and the questions they ask, are believable, so the mystery is palpable. The narrative and the way the characters are followed, the way their stories intertwine as they try to survive, makes sense. Everything works in the story.
Furthermore, the art by Veronica and Andy T. Fish is clean and consistent with the story telling. This seems like a perfectly fine graphic novel telling a really well-crafted Faustian-bargain style of story for a YA audience. Coming in as a fresh reader, I was certainly entertained and engaged by this wonderful book, and strongly recommend Hide: The Graphic Novel to any YA-readers interested in horror or horror graphic novel enthusiasts.
