Hide and Don’t Seek audiobook

This was so much fun and I absolutely recommend it to anyone who enjoys MG horror short stories! I see collections frequently compared to the ever-coveted status of Scary Stories, but they rarely live up to the parallel for me; however, Hide and Don't Seek absolutely gave me ALL the Scary Stories vibes, only for a newer, younger audience! I enjoyed every single story and poem in this collection and thought the illustrations were really fun (and occasionally quite creepy). If you think this sounds like something you or a reader in your life would be interested in, I wholeheartedly recommend grabbing a copy! Thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with this review copy in exchange for an honest review!

Hi! I wrote this book and had entirely too much fun doing so. It includes twenty spooky stories—some silly, some spine-tingling, some hide-under-the-covers scary. I hope they will make readers shiver, giggle, and shriek. I hope they'll delight and entertain you, and also make you think. Two summers ago, I wrote the collection’s opening story, about a game of hide-and-seek that never ends, to amuse myself and my nieces. It was a fun way to procrastinate from the work I was supposed to be doing, so I wrote another, and another, and another, playing with not only fears but also formats: One story is told entirely through text messages, another through letters sent home from camp. A few are in verse. One is the script of a play. There’s even a story narrated by a very good dog. And just wait until you see Carolina Godina's gorgeous and thrilling illustrations.Hide and Don't Seek is my fourteenth book but the first to be categorized as middle grade (for ages 8 to 12), and I’m excited to meet new readers, reach new classrooms, and share these spooky stories I had so much fun inventing. The night before the book comes out, I’m feeling hopeful—and beneath that, kinda scared. Not about monsters under the bed (my mattress currently lives on the floor so my 13-year-old three-legged dog can reach me when she needs comforting at night), but about...nothingness. About throwing my heart into the air without knowing if the winds will carry it. There’s so little an author can do for a book, besides write it and love it and wish it the best. But I’m grateful for the chance to sing into the abyss, and I hope a few notes will reach you.Thanks for reading.

3 1/2 stars RTC on blogThank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for my review copy.

Whew, that was a doozy! The first story had me worried that this was going to be a fairly young, somewhat predictable collection, but most of the stories actually ended up being pretty unsettling. A good many of the illustrations made me tense up, and a persistent rustling behind me actually put me on edge while I read. (No, I did not find the source of the rustling. Yes, I am at least 27% concerned about it.) This took me right back to the days when I’d read the Scary Stories trilogy in the middle of the day because the illustrations were just that disturbing and I didn’t want to make direct eye contact with them for any considerable length of time. With a few of the images in Hide and Don’t Seek, I had to hold the book at an odd angle to finish reading a page without looking too long at the pictures. That’s a compliment if I’ve ever given one! I loved the inclusiveness. Also: Good Boy is Best Boy, and I hope he’s doing okay. I will ever-so-slightly complain that I was promised laughter and did not receive it, but perhaps that was a red herring so I’d just have to read the whole thing and sit with my shivers (and that darn rustling behind me what is that). Or perhaps it contains a special brand of kid humor that will reveal itself to kids and only kids. Time will tell. Overall: spooky, spooky, spooky. A perfect way to start the Halloween season, even if it’s a bit early. (Is the rustling behind me autumn leaves? But it’s only August and I’m inside my house!)

Enjoyment: 4Total rating: 4I listened to the audiobook with my son, and we both enjoyed some stories more than others. It is a fun short story collection. I am starting to see why many readers still love MG horrors - there is a nostalgic and timeless quality that makes them engaging even to adult readers.

This book is clearly aiming to be a spiritual successor to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and honestly, I think it succeeds. While Scary Stories had many folklore/urban legend inspired stories, this keeps to newly fresh fiction while still going over classic horror tropes for kids to explore. This is great so it isn't treading the same ground, after all kids will likely be reading all of the Scary Stories books AND this, but even with the way pop culture osmosis soaks into things this may be a child's first experience with horror ideas like "be careful what you wish for"/Monkey's Paw, or even something simple like "zombies" or "vampires".There's a great mixture of happy/hopeful endings and bad endings, including a few that are more open ended. The horror is genuinely scary (I'm a bit of a horror wuss, so I often go to middlegrade horror for my interesting but more safe scares) in many of the stories, there are some reveals/twists that aren't Twilight Zone level, but more like Tales from the Crypt level. Like, not super clever, but much more appealing to the eight year old reading this. There were a few that didn't hold up to scrutiny he way I'd like them to as an adult, (view spoiler)[like the story about the doll "twin". Either the doll takes over her life, or the true horror is that she didn't realize that she was the doll the whole time (that's a Twilight Zone episode, right?) but the story seems to imply that the real human daughter has batteries on her back that the mom could turn off but she's still just a regular human. I don't really get it, and I don't know why it wasn't edited to land squarely in one explanation or the other. (hide spoiler)] That said, I doubt the intended audience is really going to mind. The short story format makes it easy to jump from one story immediately to the next, and only later in the dark going over the emotions the story made you feel, not staying on the logic.The one outlier, I felt, was the last poem, "If", which was a little more gory or gross out than the others. That's fine, kids the intended age for this are into that sort of thing more than I am, but it just didn't fit tonally. It seems like it should go with a horror book that has plenty of gross stories. The story about worms manages to involve some body horror while staying closer to the overall tone of the book and doesn't feel like an outlier, so this is kind of odd. Overall, I liked the level off horror and the variety of good/bad endings, as well as the included diversity in both pictures and text that are mentioned in a very natural "in passing" way. No one experiences the horror because they happen to be gay or brown, but many of the characters are pictured as brown or are a girl who happens to grow up and have a wife. I think this is a great book for a kid's section of a library or for the "cool aunt/uncle" to slip them when they're an appropriate age. It's the sort of book that can easily feel "forbidden" and therefore get a kid reading long past their bedtime.

-The details and story telling are pure gold. -I absolutely love how each story is different - not only just the storyline but the format in which it is told. I must see the physical copy of this book when it comes out! -A middle-grade horror must-read. I would not call myself a prolific horror reader so some of these stories even had me a little spooked!

3.5⭐

These scary stories definitely lean toward a younger age group, but I was still creeped out by most of them. The various formats (story, prose, script, text, etc.) make the stories interesting. Each one had a thrill factor of it's own. I enjoyed the creepiness of the stories without experiencing the gore that comes with more adult horror stories.

Lovers of all things that go bump in the night will devour this diverse, original collection of spooky short stories, creepy poems, and even a tale told through text. A must-read for fans, old and new, of Alvin Schwartz’s classic Scary Stories series. Lots of fun!

Very interesting stories. Exactly what I was looking for! I am not really into slasher stories, just creepy ones and this hit the spot. Loved it!

A new terror classic for young readers. Some of these tales are just nasty. As they should be.

This was creepy and fun! I love it so much!!

Today I am reviewing “Hide and Don’t Seek: And Other Very Scary Stories” by Anica Mrose Rissi! I also found this book on Twitter. It’s marketed as a sort of spiritual successor to “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” books by Alvin Schwartz, which I think many people are very nostalgic for. It’s been a very long time since I have read those (though I can still quote some of them!), but I was excited to read something like it again! It’s hard to summarize this book, since it’s a collection. There are short stories, poems, the script of a play, and more. While there is no overarching plot connecting them, all of them are wonderfully creepy. It’s hard for me to discuss any of the stories without spoilers, so let me just say that they’re all good. It’s hard for me to choose my favorite one. “Truly Delicious” is up there. I think “The Girl and the Crow” is the most thought-provoking, far more than you might expect from a spooky kidlit book. The implications of how we teach girls to be docile and polite make this a hard-hitting story. “Good Dog and Bad Cat: The Scariest Tail” made me emotional because, dang it, I just love sweet and loyal dogs. The art in this book is also super eerie. It very much fits the stories. These also give me “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” vibes. I might recommend adults give this book a quick read-though just to make sure it’s a good level of creepy for their kids. Nothing in here is *too* scary, but some of them are a little unnerving, so if you are a parent/guardian of more timid children, just give it a read. I think you’ll like it too. In general, I think this is fine for most middle schoolers and some elementary schoolers, but your millage may vary.