3 Stars

I had higher than high hopes for this book. I have immensely enjoyed Kiersten White’s writing before and I’m a sucker for a horror novel, especially one involving an amusement park. This book unfortunately fell a little flat for me and didn’t give me the thrills and chills I was hoping for.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are…”
Fourteen competitors are playing the ultimate game of hide and seek, spending a week in an abandoned amusement park and hoping they’re not the first one to be found. They have no idea who or how many are seeking them, they just need to be hidden everyday from sun up to sun down. But then the game starts to become more sinister, people are disappearing everyday and the competitors start to wonder WHAT it is they’re actually hiding from.

If anyone knows me, you know I love me an unreliable narrator. Or in the case of this book, multiple unreliable narrators as the book was told from multiple perspectives and was also written in third-person. And maybe that’s what was throwing me off with this book a little was not reading directly from those perspectives themselves, instead it was told to me from their perspective. Granted that did help me not get confused on who was speaking but I think I would have preferred to view it through their eyes instead of like a commentary.

Another thing that I didn’t really like about this book was it wasn’t THAT scary. I know that opinion is to each their own but if you’re going to hand me something marketed as a supernatural thriller I would like to be spooked, and I wasn’t. There were a few times things got a little chilling especially up to the reveal of who the monster really is that had me waiting with bated breath but then I lost interest about halfway through the book.

I will say, the ending is what tied the book up for me and is the reason I’m not giving this book a lower rating. I was flying through the end of it and it was exactly the type of revenge story I wanted to happen.

All in all, not a bad book but I feel it could have been a little more scary (again, to each their own) but overall still a decent read. I have always enjoyed the author’s works and will continue to read them in the future.

K*Many thanks to Random House Publishing-Ballantine for the gifted copy for my honest review*