What do you get when you take an already scary book and turn it into a visual experience? Absolute terror. And it’s good.
Every writer tackling a horror story or thriller has a bucket from which to pull, mix, match, and merge ideas. Some of these stories weave original threads between common tropes. Others brilliantly bring classic tales into modern settings. For many, it’s a little bit of everything.
From her bucket, Kiersten White unearthed some classics: Amusement park — make it abandoned. Seemingly invisible monster that chooses its prey at random. A mismatched group of seemingly innocent people — make them all different, give them all one thing in common, but don’t reveal that secret too soon.
Then she took things up a notch. And another. And yet another. And as if that weren’t enough, Scott Peterson, Veronica Fish, and Andy Fish turned the book into a graphic novel.
Hide did not need a visual component to pack its punches, but the graphic novel adaption was too scary for me to read alone in the dark. (I read it in the middle of the day, in a room with many windows.) Everyone experiences different media in unique ways, and the more I read graphic novels, the more I discover how much certain stories can benefit from the format. Here you get the same journal entries from the book, but stylized to feel like you’re really reading them along with the characters. You see the world; it leaps from the pages.
(Writing of pages, I know I’m a professional journalist, but can I take a moment to veer from my norm and tell you that this book smells amazing? If for no other reason, pick up your own copy of Hide: The Graphic Novel because it smells like it was just printed yesterday, in a glorious bibliophilical way, and I can’t get over it.)
As someone obsessed with how stories get made, I love that Hide began with a writer and has now sought the help of additional artists to bring it to life in a new way. Readers don’t get to see the process; they only see the product. Flipping through the pages of this book (trying not to get distracted by the aroma), I don’t just imagine the care, attention, and love that went into making this book; I can see it. I can feel it. In a time when writers and editors and illustrators and designers don’t get the recognition we deserve, I have to shine a light on it when I see it — the mounds of effort that must have gone into making something so beautiful.
This book is for you if you like to compare the versions of characters you created in your head to actual images. It’s for you even if you’ve never opened a graphic novel before. It’s for you even if you don’t always enjoy being scared. The story has layers, and all of them are worth unpeeling.
Hide: The Graphic Novel will excite you and intrigue you and maybe it will break your heart a little bit, and that’s why you should get your own copy right now.
Meg Dowell is the creator of Brain Rush, dedicated to helping writers put their ideas into words, and Not a Book Hoarder, celebrating books of all kinds. She is an editor, writer, book reviewer, podcaster, and photographer passionate about stories and how they get made.
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