Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review!

Hide is an excellent graphic novel that is full of suspense and gory moments. I found myself fully engaged because I wanted to know the answers to the mysteries the novel presented. The plot was good, and it did an amazing job of keeping the suspense consistent throughout the whole thing. I found myself asking over and over "But WHY?" whilst reading. There are a LOT of characters, so some of them near the start feel like toss-away characters, but the plot doesn't lose points for that. It's a standard thing within horror stories of this nature. The one thing I massively disliked was the ending. I was startled when I flipped the page to see the afterword and the acknowledgments. But, I can't personally think of any other way they could have ended the novel, so it's a bit of a moot point. The art style was good! I really liked how each of the characters were designed, they all felt unique even though they were probably meant to be a little bit trope-y. Several scenes are pretty damn gory, but they're not as bad as I thought they would be, seeing as it's a horror graphic novel. Another thing that slightly irked me is that there are parts of the graphic novel that are nothing but text. Literally, just pages upon pages of text on an illustration. I want to condemn it, but if you don't read those walls of text, the novel would make no sense. Those text-only pages are crucial to understanding the plot and having the answers to the mysteries the story presents. It's one of those "It's annoying but it's necessary" moments. I personally feel like this could be adapted into an excellent movie or TV series, as long as they change that lackluster ending.

Spoiler Talk!
[The one big plus of this is that there is decent queer representation in this novel, AND NEITHER OF THEM DIES! Yes, both of the queer characters get out alive in the end! I also really liked the one character that is a black lesbian woman who is a veteran. Not only does her surviving the game make perfect sense, but it was also nice to not have them fall into either trope of killing off the only black character or the lesbian. (Bury Your Gays and Black Person Dies First, tropes respectively.) The main character, whom we see most of the novel told through, is also a queer girl. I really hope the implication is that they both get to live happily ever after escaping is truthful.

I also did enjoy the whole "Cult from the 50s summoned a cosmic horror entity to ensure enteral prosperity but fucked it up somehow" thing. The family members of the original 14 cult members having to carry on the sacrifices in order to keep prosperity is a classic trope, but it's always interesting to read. The only thing that confused me is that they let people spread out and had to track them down later. Why not have people from the original 14 family lines have a child with the intended purpose of it being a sacrifice, and train that child from birth to be a willing sacrifice? Would that not be easier than having to track down these distant relatives and trick them into going into the park? I guess that they wouldn't have thought of that, cause those closest to the original fourteen view themselves as better than everyone else. But still, they are kind of dumb for not thinking of that. I also cackled out loud when one of the characters calls Linda a "demon-worshipping predator" and she responds by going "I am a Christian!" indignantly. Like...lady, you're part of a family line who summoned a horrific entity using ancient arcane rituals, sacrificed themselves to it to make a blood pact, and you organize a sacrifice of fourteen people to it every seven years, and you're insisting you're a Christian? Something about that irony is so funny. ( )