Hide

“It takes money to make money, her dad used to say. He also once said Come out, come out, wherever you are, dragging the knife along the wall as music to accompany the dying gasps of her sister.”

This passage juxtaposes the ordinary and clichéd advice offered by Mack’s father with the horror and violence that he enacted on her family. By placing the two side by side, White banishes all sense of normalcy from the novel and provides a glimpse into Mack’s trauma. She is so affected by her father’s actions that, in some ways, she has never truly escaped his grasp, and these lasting wounds deeply affect her experience in the treacherous park.

“Mack realizes Ava has become Ava, not buzzed Ava. She’s the main Ava in Mack’s worldview. When Mack woke up—before Ava—Ava’s head was on her shoulder, tucked in.”

Mack tries to avoid human connection at all costs, preferring to remain safely alone and unnoticed. However, she is beginning to feel drawn to Ava and is dismayed to realize that this particular Ava now holds a special significance for her. In sleep, their physical closeness also transcends some of Mack’s instinctive barriers, and this brief moment of bonding foreshadows that she will change for the better as she builds new connections in order to survive.

“‘Oh, of course, dear.’ Their hostess’s lipstick has migrated to her front teeth, making her smile look bloody. ‘Breakfast is on us! And all your meals during the competition will be on-site. Now that you’re here, the only thing you have to worry about is not being found.’”

Linda is currently the chief architect of Asterion’s sacrifices, and since she cultivates an air of friendliness and harmlessness through her demeanor and her status as an older, wealthy white woman, many of the contestants fail to realize that she is a predator. However, White imbues Linda’s appearances with small details suggesting the presence of grisly horror, as when her smeared lipstick gives her a “bloody” smile.

“The walls and the furniture are pristine white. The kind of white that screams Don’t touch me to people like Mack. The kind of white that purrs You deserve me to people like Rebecca.”

All the contestants are shaped by their past experiences. To Mack, who was raised amid violence and poverty, the “pristine white” of the spa is frightening and reminds her that she doesn’t belong in this opulent place. However, to someone like Rebecca, an actress who is accustomed to affluence, the spa is a luxury that she takes for granted.

“Mack shoulders her bag. ‘He seems like he knows how to hide.’ ‘Takes one to know one, huh?’ Ava’s smile is wry. ‘You’re my dark horse. Even when you’re next to me, I get the feeling you’re not really there.’”

Ava is very perceptive and understands that Mack is adept at hiding, both physically and emotionally. For this reason, Ava refers to Mack as her “dark horse,” emphasizing that Mack might be the unexpected winner whom the other contestants underestimate. The “my” also adds a touch of intimacy here since Ava is beginning to think of Mack as a close ally.

“It feels like a sign, seeing the name Stratton here. Like this is his chance back into the world she left behind. The one he’s going to make for himself, and his wife, and his kids. He smiles and settles in, kept company by an imaginary Rosiee while the real one bleeds and sweats and worries in the middle of an engine.”

Christian spends his time in the park fantasizing about what he will gain from winning the contest. In this scene, he ironically connects the appearance of his mother’s given surname to her wealth, but he fails to realize her connection to the park and does not perceive the danger he is in. He imagines himself marrying Rosiee and having a middle-class life with her, but he has never spoken to her in the park. In a wry contrast to his fantasies, the real Rosiee is oblivious to his thoughts and is frightened and uncomfortable less than a mile away.

“Mack leads Ava away from the emptying camp. It’s stupid. She shouldn’t do it. But there are still so many competitors, so what can it hurt? Ava isn’t a miser with kindness. Mack is. Today, though, she can still afford to be generous. Today she will repay Ava with sleep, so they can be even. That’s all. She just wants to be out of Ava’s debt.”

Though Mack tries to resist her impulses toward kindness, she still gives in and helps Ava in this moment, rationalizing her action as repaying a “debt.” Although she sees herself as a “miser with kindness,” it is clear that Mack underestimates her own capacity for goodness because she is so traumatized by her father’s murder spree.

“It’s been seven months. Seven months is an eternity. After all, God created the world in seven days, and LeGrand destroyed his own in seven hours.”

LeGrand is disoriented in the outside world after spending his childhood in a cult. He processes the world using religious imagery, wryly berating himself by reflecting that although God created the world in seven days, LeGrand has managed to destroy his own in seven hours. This imagery shows that LeGrand uses his religion to make sense of the world and that he blames himself for being exiled from the cult.

“She turns and sees a single tear trace down Ava’s face before Ava squeezes her eyes closed and turns her head so she can’t see down anymore. Ava knows the difference, too. ‘Jaden,’ Ava whispers, reassuring herself or Mack or neither of them. ‘I’ll bet it’s him, setting everyone up.’ They both stay where they are, trapped in the prison of silence left in the wake of an unanswered scream.”

Both Ava and Mack have suffered trauma in the past and recognize the screams in the park as evidence of real violence. However, due to their respective traumatic pasts, they are “trapped in the prison of silence” and cannot bring themselves to intervene. The razor-sharp tension of the scene emphasizes their acute terror and sense of helplessness as they hide from the unseen horrors around them.

“What was Atrius doing? Trying to keep track of where he was going or where he had been? Trying to lure them into a trap? Or just being an asshole with a can of spray paint, marking his presence on a place utterly indifferent to it? Why anyone would want to leave traces of themselves everywhere they went is beyond Mack.”

Mack cannot understand Atrius’s motives because they are so different from her own. While she only wants to hide, he wants to be seen and uses his graffiti to “mark his presence” accordingly. Despite the two characters’ differences in outlook, Atrius’s marks also serve as a plot device, helping Mack realize that the park is a maze.

“He knows Ava is a sinner, dirty, wrong, but he also feels like Ava would have helped him back home. Would have made the same choice he did. If Ava’s lost, so is he, and, well, at least she’s the kind of lost who stays up with you when you’re crying at night.”

Throughout the novel, LeGrand grapples with cognitive dissonance, struggling to reconcile his current experiences with the ideas that he was taught as a child. Caught in their anti-gay bias, his family’s cult would have labeled Ava a “sinner” who is “dirty,” but he also sees that she is kind and helps people who need it, unlike the so-called righteous members of the cult. He therefore begins to identify with her and partially overcomes the harmful programming of his past, deciding that although he and Ava are both “lost,” they can at least help one another.

“She takes her seat next to the head of the table, glaring at the empty chairs. Her family made the gate. Her mother created the Amazement Park. And Linda figured out how to keep things working after it closed. How to run this stupid game. But by all means, save those spots for the Callas heirs.”

The venom and bitterness of Linda’s private thoughts permeate this particular passage, contrasting sharply with the friendly façade that she earlier showed to the so-called “contestants.” While the human sacrifices are fighting for their lives against the monster, Linda is more concerned with maintaining and advancing her status among the other well-to-do families of Asterion. She is angry that the Callas heirs get to lead when she thinks that her family has done all the hard work to guarantee their prosperity. Her rage over these perceived slights underscores just how out of touch she and the other families are and how far they will go to justify their evil actions.

“He doesn’t like that number. Or these images. Who painted them here? Why go to all the trouble of painting creepy murals in a decades-old abandoned amusement park attraction on the off chance someone tries to hide in here and sees them? Chekhov’s mural. If a monster appears in a mural in the first act, it must necessarily eat someone in the final act.”

In literature, the phrase “Chekhov’s gun” refers to the principle that any element introduced early in a story must become relevant later on. Through the character of Ian, White introduces this idea to deliver some heavy-handed foreshadowing of the monster’s existence. This is also a moment of dramatic irony since White has already made it clear that that the “creepy murals” are depicting the truth and are not merely decorative.

“The price is paid willingly and with faith for the future that the future will hold the faith with us and we will endure through you I have faith I have faith I have faith I have faith but oh god there are stars beyond its maw and they are stars I do not know and my Mary has gone to them and now I will too.”

The excerpts from Tommy Callas’s letter explain the dark events that founded the town. Though Tommy insists that the “price is paid willingly,” his repetition of the word “faith” and the ungrammatical structure of the sentence suggest his underlying air of panic and doubt. This excerpt evokes the horror of the monster that Tommy and the families have unleashed, suggesting that he might be doubting the wisdom of the bargain.

“Their families are the police now, and the senators, and the judges. There will be no consequences. We let Doreen flee, because she does not matter, which is why it is so maddening that she could not be the sacrifice.”

Hobart Keck’s journal reveals his classism and racism: attitudes that are widely shared by the founding families of Asterion. He thinks it is “maddening” that Doreen, a Black woman employed as a maid, will not be eaten by the monster. She “does not matter” to him and the other families, so he believes that she is far more expendable than the founding families, whose privileged background has allowed them to become police, senators, and judges.

“And Ava stares into the darkness, darkness in her mind and her heart, smelling phantom smoke and charred flesh as she waits to see who comes back.”

Ava has PTSD from her experience in military combat and struggles to overcome it in the midst of her bid to survive the ravages of the park. She is haunted by “phantom smoke and charred flesh” from the memory of her injury and the death of her lover, Maria. Her trauma is also expressed in her fears that she will be left alone again.

“They are being punished, and for the first time since he was excommunicated and banished, a thought rises to the top, burning bright and holy like a bush on the mountainside: I don’t deserve this.”

This passage marks a shift in LeGrand’s thinking as he realizes that the abuses he suffered when trapped in the cult were not his fault. Once again, he invokes religious imagery to convey these new thoughts, describing them as “bright and holy,” just like the burning bush of the Old Testament, which represents a sign from God. Significantly, his use of religious imagery has changed from self-recrimination to renewal as he realizes that the cult is to blame for the wrongs he suffered.

“If all the world is hell and evil is all around them, what else can they do but try to help each other?”

LeGrand is resigned to the violence of the world and thinks that if it is “hell” as he has been taught, then the only solution is to turn toward love for his fellow humans. Rather than dismissing those around him as damned, he instead decides to work toward survival with them. His belief in his own damnation has changed into a belief that he and the others deserve to survive.

“All these people who had sad lives like him, who had been unloved and lost, had turned that in on themselves and crafted perfect machines of bodies. Machines that could do incredible things. Machines that functioned so well they couldn’t be sad or hurt or lonely anymore.”

Throughout the novel, Jaden’s callous actions and overt hostility alienate him from the rest of the group, and although he operates on the assumption that the contest really is just a game, he is nonetheless responsible for the deaths of several others. However, in this scene, White provides a glimpse into his private insecurities about his own self-worth. Since he imagines himself to be “unloved and lost,” he seeks a shallow sort of “salvation” in becoming a physically fit “machine” so that he can never be hurt again.

“He knows there’s violence here—he can’t deny it—but it’s one thing to see a monster and another to be shot at by a human. Thirteen years of active shooter drills in school, and all he can think is there’s no door to shut. No desk to hide behind. No teacher to put herself between him and a bullet.”

Here, Brandon connects the mythical violence of the novel’s monsters to the real-world violence of school shootings. White uses this scene to deliver an element of social commentary, suggesting that although children in the US are often trained from a young age to expect violence in school settings, Brandon remains vulnerable and unprepared when confronted with gun violence.

“The presence of an actual monster behind them doesn’t factor into his internal wrestling. He was raised in a world of angels and devils, of gods and prophets and miracles. Why shouldn’t there also be monsters?”

Ironically, LeGrand’s offbeat upbringing has rendered him more accepting of the fantastic, and unlike the others, he suffers no cognitive dissonance over the existence of the monster. Having grown up in a world without TV, internet, or cell phones, he has constantly heard about “gods and prophets and miracles,” and as a result, he is not surprised when a supernatural element manifests in his radius.

“The town, a car, escape. She repeats it in her mind, going over and over the elements like they’re beads on her mother’s rosary. The town. A car. Escape.”

While Ava herself is not religious, she imagines the survival-oriented words of her litany as “beads on her mother’s rosary.” This simile connects her mother’s faith and her loving childhood to Ava’s current struggle to survive. Though she doesn’t believe like her mother did, she still clings to The Necessity of Hope as a kind of faith.

“Atop a short, broad neck, its face is a flat expanse with two nostrils, flaring as the monster breathes in deeply, searching. The terrible scarring where they put out its eyes balances between incongruously delicate ears, velvet soft, sloping on either side of the head beneath the long, sensuously curving crown of horns. They look heavy. She wonders if they make its neck ache after a day of hunting.”

When Mack is finally confronted with the monster, she is surprised to find that she feels some compassion for it. In addition to its hideous qualities, she sees its “incongruously delicate ears, velvet soft,” and imagines that it might be in pain. Though the monster is her opponent, she recognizes that it never consented to this bargain and that it is also being manipulated by the people of Asterion.