What's the scariest childhood game?
Daka Hermon's Hide and Seeker, and Old Gods of Appalachia.
Hi, friends,
After reading the book that I’m going to tell you about, I started poking around, and it turns out that there are like, 9 BILLION other books centered around hide and seek? Lots of picture books about the actual game, but also a LOT of kidnapping books and a few other horror novels.
And so, suddenly, it made me realize that maybe THAT’S why I never particularly liked playing hide and seek as a kid? Like, it was a weirdly stressful game, because it was kind of scary?
I never particularly liked playing Sardines, either, because it always reached a point where there’d be one poor kid left out and all alone while everyone else was squashed together and giggling?
Man, I will never not be the Fun Police, I guess.
ANYWAY, I came away from this book feeling more satisfied with my Fun Police ways, because obviously, if playing childhood games could possibly result in me ending up in some awful alternate reality, I’m forevermore going to feel a-okay about sitting the game out and, like, just eating an ice cream cone or something.
(If there’s a horror story about how eating ice cream results in horrible things, let me know. Beyond Ice Cream Man, I mean. Oh, and I guess that ice cream figured into this book, too. DAMN IT. IS NOTHING SAFE??)
Reading: Hide and Seeker, by Daka Hermon
A year ago, one of Justin’s best friends went missing.
No one knows where Zee was, what he went through, or how he made his way home. Now he’s back, but he’s not the same person he was when he disappeared. In the hopes that it’ll help him find some normalcy, his mother throws him a Welcome Home party.
It doesn’t go well, especially after Zee realizes that his guests have been playing Hide & Seek while they were waiting for him to come outside:
Zee shakes so hard, I swear I hear his bones rattle. His eyes dart around our group before zeroing in on me. “What did you do? I didn’t want this! You should have stayed away!”
My heart skips. “Zee . . .”
“Out of the darkness, no more light, now it comes to steal your life. On this day you’ve sealed your fate, by playing what it loves to hate. Once you’re tagged, then you’ll know. The mark appears, it’s your time to go,” Zee chants. “Now you’re in the final count. It’s closer to the set amount.”
Here’s how I know that a book is really Bringing The Suspense—when I turn the page and see that I’m almost at the end of a chapter, my eyes immediately flit to the last sentence to prepare myself for whatever’s coming. Basically, when I’m reading something that has me super-enthralled, I have no control over my own eyeballs.
Hide and Seeker was one of those reads.
The basic premise is this: There is a monster connected to the game Hide & Seek. Break the rules, get catapulted into an alternate reality where you have to face amped-up versions of your own personal fears.
You’re there either until you escape, or until you make a deal with the Seeker.
And no one escapes.
• I loved the world-building. The rules of the fantasy system are super-fun—and for-real scary!—and there are multiple instances where the author takes a situation and just tweaks it a little bit, adds another wrinkle, and makes it That. Much. Worse. (This is horror, so that’s a GOOD thing!!)
• I loved that the kids recognize certain situations as horror tropes, and avoid making Classic Mistakes (like splitting up).
• I loved Justin’s narration, which included lines like:
Yeah, my “other things” list is so long I trip over it when I walk.
and
He watches her, his eyes full of beating hearts.
• I loved how Hermon showed how racism and social injustice compounds the problems that these kids are already dealing with. At one point the kids are literally pulled over on their bicycles by a police officer, who wants to know why they’re… riding bikes; later, Justin’s sister is trying to report him missing, and they brush her off. She shows the police being over-interested and then completely dismissive, and both times, it’s so unfair and maddening and scary. (Unlike the rest of the scares in the book, those ones are not fun, because they’re real.)
• I loved that our heroes, when interacting with kids who’ve been trapped for years—in some cases, decades—by the Seeker, acknowledge that while they can empathize to a degree, that they will never be able to fully understand what those trapped children have been through. That’s a nuance that a lot of people don’t understand about trauma, I think, and it was really, really fantastic to see it highlighted here.
It looks like she’s got another book in the works—the tagline on Hermon’s website says, “Nightmare on Elm Street meets Monster Squad," which, WHAAAAAT YES PLEASE! Even if it’s unrelated I wish it was in my hands, like, yesterday.
Added to the TBR:
The Dollhouse: A Ghost Story, by Charis Cotter.
Malamander, by Thomas Taylor.
The Girl in the Lake, by India Hill Brown.
Listening: Old Gods of Appalachia
Oh, wow. I realize that I might be the last person to discover this one, but I just finished marathoning Season One, and… yeah. Wow.
The creators describe it as a horror anthology podcast, and the arcs do largely work on their own, but they’re also part of a larger whole. It’s dark, it’s Lovecraftian—minus the ingrained racism and so on—it’s gory and completely engrossing and did I mention that it’s DARK?
There’s some really great voice acting, a super-immersive soundscape, and I don’t know how he does it, but the narrator brings warmth and humanity into his storytelling, even as he describes some of the flat-out grossest scenes I’ve run across in a long while.
I love it, and I’m already upset that I know I’m going to blow through the rest of the available episodes soon.
A few links:
PW: Jason Reynolds Extends Term as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.
Sci-fi & Scary: A review of Hide and Seeker.
Charlotte’s Library: A review of Hide and Seeker.
Twitter: A tweet that made me absurdly happy.
If you do an annual dive into spooky season, have you started yours, or do you wait for October?
Talk to you soon,
Leila
THE BOOK COVER for Hide & Seeker even has stressed me right the hell out. SO much NO on that poor wee eye peeking out, traumatized...
LOL to being the fun police. I played Sardines when camping, so it was only an every once in a while game, but man, hide and seek was SUPER stressful to me, too! I ended up finding the adults and just "hiding" there, because that's always a laugh riot. ::sigh:: I was NOT good at being a kid.