Such a fun collection of spooky short stories for young readers. I can see this being a huge hit at my middle school book club. Loved it.

Hide and Don't Seek is a great collection of CreepyPasta style stories for kids. The stories are well-crafted engaging tales that make creepy things downright scary. Dolls that steal your life, a game of hide and seek gone wrong, a dog that tries desperately to save his boy, and more. I loved the scariness that comes from not really knowing why something happened. I never read the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series so I was expecting the stories to be longer and more fleshed out. But once I realized they were all short and creepy i was able to really get into the book and enjoy it.

Thank you NetGalley for the advanced e-arc.

What a super creepy, weirdly twisted middle grade book! Some of these stories make you tuck your feet under the blankets in bed and some are just warnings. I think my middle grade children might actually read this.

3 stars. Thank you Netgalley for the arc. I always have a hard time rating short story collections. I loved some of the stories and poems and others just fell really short. The writing wasn't my favorite but the vibes were good. Definitely recommend for younger readers.

This fun throwback to the Scary Stories series is perfect for the new generation.
I remember being so enthralled by the original series, the short stories of terror and fright, reading late into the night long after my parents told me to go to bed.
Hide and Don't Seek does not disappoint! My 13 year old self is giddy.

Within these pages are poems, short stories, moral tales and hauntings full of surprises. I really enjoyed the different formats the stories took, how they were each creepy and scary without being gooey or too over the top. Poems, one story is in the form of letters, they were all different but equally parts of a cohesive collection meant to make you just on the edge of uncomfortable. I like the slight chill that crept up my back as I was reading, the faint noise I would hear and have to convince myself that it was only the wind.

That's what so fun about this book is that it is slow and creeps up on you, into your bones and before you know it, ten stories in, every noise you hear is someone rattling the door knobs.

Some stories are stronger than others but all were fun to read and it's easy to see how kids can bring them in and read them to friends and totally creep each other out. I loved especially the illustrations no every story, the ships pencil drawings that were dark and sinister as well as simple and clean. It was the perfect blend.

I'm going to recommend this book to some of my friends who had Scary Stories growing up and have fond memories of reading them under the covers. I'm glad we have a new anthology to add to our collection.

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, [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.

This is a really fun read that anyone who enjoys a little bit of fear will devour in one sitting. This collection of scary stories will creep you out and chuckle along the way as well! There's something in here for everyone, whether it is ghosts, skeletons, disappearing people, and even people turning into animals! Some stories are written in prose, others poetry, and one is even written in a transcript of a phone call.

I remember reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark when I was a kid in school. I think we can add this title to that shelf of books because these scary tales are certainly in that same vane! You can read them one story per sitting and just plow through the whole book at once! I know I went back and read a couple of them over a second time in order to share them with my kids as well!

Thank you #netgalley and #quilltreebooks for sending me this copy. I thought it was a creepy book for young readers. It reminded me of the books like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Some stories in the book like Hide and Don't Seek, Once Upon a Time and the Boy and the Crow were good. I think it could have been more like a book on its own.

This book will go perfectly between Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Scary Stories for Sleepovers on a kid's shelf. The collection of short stories are spooky and slightly chilling without being nightmare-inducing. It's short, the stories are varied in both style and characters, and is an easy read. Some of the ideas were very original, and some sparked a sense of familiarity without feeling "overdone". Loved it!

Kudos to Rissi for creating a truly dark/creepy/scary anthology of short stories for the middle grade set. Often, books are billed as such but are too mild for young horror fans. In fact, I would argue that many of my 8th grade students will be just as freaked out by these stories as my 6th graders will be.

Among my favorites stories are the title tale, "The Girl and the Crow," and "Once Upon a Time." Although the accompanying illustrations I saw were not finalized, I could tell that Carolina Godina's drawings will augment the creepiness of the text, much like Stephen Gammell's do in the classic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

I'll definitely need to purchase multiple copies for my middle school libraries.

This was a hit-or-miss collection of twenty spooky stories and poems. My favorites were:

* Truly Delicious - a series of letters home from summer camp detail an increasingly alarming situation

* Good Dog & Bad Cat - loved that this was told from the perspective of the dog

* Only A Dream - delightfully creepy

* Superstition: The Play - who didn’t love a good round of Bloody Mary at a slumber party?

* Two Wishes - tween Twilight Zone

* If - perfectly gross poem about the monsters under your bed (and the importance of keeping your feet inside the covers)

Some of the stories definitely needed more fleshing out, but this was overall an enjoyable book, and kids who are Alvin Schwartz/Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark fans will be into it.

Good collection of short spooky stories for middle grade readers. This was a quick and fun read that is great for young horror readers.

This book did provide me with a lot of new and creative spooky stories, but a few of them were difficult to understand. Overall, I think it’s a quick read for people!

This book was great and scary! I enjoyed the short story formatting of it. I would recommend this to kids in this age group!

I enjoyed this collection of eerie stories. Short enough to be engaging and it packs quite a variety of chilling tales.

A selection of creepy and spooky, imaginative stories middle schoolers will love. This was such fun to read and I can't wait to get it for my library.

I love short, spooky stories but just can't get behind Rissi's Hide and Don't Seek. There are a few good stories and a few less than stellar stories but, for the most part, the stories felt blah. The twists weren't original, the writing felt uneven, and the stories lacked depth. It's hard to not compare this collection to the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series that most scary story-loving kids (and adults) read, but since several of the stories in this collection feel inspired by stories included in that series, it's even harder. Unfortunately, this collection falls into the "it's not that bad" category rather than one I would recommend.

Thank you NetGalley and Quill Tree Books for the opportunity to read an advance reading copy.

This book was received as an ARC from HarperCollins Children's Books - Quill Tree Books in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.

This book brought back to many memories when I read the original Scary Stories in elementary school and all of the reactions of all my classmates on how ridiculously scary they were. However in Hide and Don't Seek, these were far more modern and more creative. Among the young men and those who like Scary Stories, this book will be perfect especially read on Halloween. I know we have a lot of young readers looking for more Scary Stories that are age appropriate and like the original Scary Stories, this book will be perfect for school libraries for a special Halloween unit.

We will consider adding this title to our JFiction collection at our library. That is why we give this book 5 stars.

Such a great spooky read! The writing was very atmospheric and helped build the suspense. Most of the stories creeped me out while a few left me confused. Overall, I can’t wait for others to read and experience this book!