I’m not going to give a real description of this book because the more you don’t know, the better it will be. Here are the bare minimums: horror genre without tons of gore, social commentary, a competitive hide-and-seek tournament, and a creepy abandoned amusement park. Those are the elements. From there, best to go in blind.

This is quite possibly the best book I’ve read all year. I actually read it twice, the first time for the story, the second for the deeper elements. The plot and the characters were perfectly written. The writing itself was exquisite and visceral. The social commentary was scorchingly on point. This is a book that I will be buying and keeping and likely rereading many times. I can’t recommend it enough. Instead of trying, I’m simply going to pick out some of my favorite quotes, passages that made me fall deeper in love as I went through the story.

*****
The topiary trees have shifted like nightmares, taking something known and distorting it until the familiar becomes monstrous. She looks away from an agonized, swollen head screaming leafy terror at the sky.

The trees around her go silent. And then she hears a heavy footstep. And another. Something about the slow, deliberate pace drains all her anger and replaces it with fear. She sinks down into a crouch, closing her eyes, reduced to a child’s logic. If she can’t see them, they can’t see her.

“Cool story, man,” Ava says. “Tell me about how you walked uphill to school both ways, twenty miles in the snow, and how going to school didn’t put you in six-figure debt, and how your first house cost less than a car, and then I’ll tell you a story about how your generation fucked mine over.”

A single scream careens through the park, echoing and being torn apart as it looks for purchase in their ears. In any ears.

The idea that there’s an end point, a goal, is gossamer floating on the air, sparkling and ephemeral.

She can sense the resentment radiating off of Jaden as they trudge back toward camp, like the Axe Body Spray of aggression, stinging her nose and making her heart skitter with anxiety.

It makes her want to scream, this feeling, this hope that feels more dangerous than anything stalking them. Because the hope has already found her, already snared her, already sunk in its claws that will absolutely eviscerate her when it’s ripped away.

Mack lies on her side, curls around her own emptiness, and falls into sleep like stepping off a ledge.

It’s not a swing ride anymore. The chains for the swings hang down like strands of unwashed hair, clumped together in some parts, broken short in others. A few of the chains still have swings at the bottom, or what’s left of the swings, anyway. The thick central pole seems stable enough, rising straight up to where the system of swing arms extend out. The whole thing is stark and depressing, like a giant denuded umbrella.

She sorts through her memories, reports what happened as though typing it up after the fact, removing herself and her emotions. Nouns, verbs, stripped of feelings.

“We know they are all worthless, scrounging, contributing nothing. Drains on the society we help build and bolster. They are too good for a week of honest labor? It makes me so angry, the entitlement, the laziness.”

This should never have been her fight. But isn’t every fight her fight, whether she benefits from it or not? She’s so tired of having to fight.

Daylight pierces the trees, the ivy, the feral topiary.

Her eyes look like blank hollows, her face white, her hair black. Like an artist’s impression of a person, but one they didn’t think was worth finishing. Tear it out of the sketchbook, start over.