Everything you would expect from a YA horror.
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The blurb
‘She sat us all down and told us a story. About things that lived in the woods. Things that only came out at night.’
For Charlie, a school ski trip is the perfect escape from his unhappy home life. Until a storm blows in and the resort town is cut off from the rest of the world. Trapped on the mountain, the students wait for the blizzards to pass, along with mysterious ski guide Hanna.
But as night falls and the town’s long buried secrets begin to surface, the storm is the least of their problems…. Something is out there, something ancient and evil, among the pines and the deep untracked drifts, watching and waiting. And when the storms blow in, Charlie and his schoolmates wake to find the resort deserted. The few left alive on the snowbound mountain will wish they were somewhere, anywhere else.
The Review
The premise for this book is chilling. A school ski trip, where a snowstorm cuts them off from the outside world is scary enough. Added to that, all of the locals pack up and leave the town just before the snowstorm and are being pretty shady about the whole thing...they know something, but they aren't saying what.
And then the kids on the school trip wake up to find that all their teachers seem to have disappeared. It is just them left with their ski guides and they are wildly unprepared for the horrors that are about to unfold.
The blurb doesn't really tell you this, but I should warn you that this book is a bit ... 'vampire-y', in case that's not your type of thing. However, if you're now imagining some twilight-esque vampires that seem human and have morals, then think again. These monsters are hideous and all they want is to satisfy their desire for human flesh.
Much like your typical horror movie, the students are picked off one by one. The author isn't afraid to get pretty gruesome with the descriptions of their deaths either. It is, as you might expect, pretty gory. My preference is for creepy books, rather than all out horror, but I enjoyed the pace of the book. The group lurch from one horrific attack to another and you don't get much time to catch your breath.
You get your full quota of stereotypical teen characters; the spoilt rich girl, the geeky boy, the sports jocks etc. And some of them are really downright obnoxious! There were quite a few in the cast that I was quite happy for the vampires to pick off and some of them were just a bit too cliché to really feel credible.
It's a relief to me that YA fiction still does horror pretty well. I remember reading the 'Goosebumps' books when I was younger (much too young to be reading them in fact) and freaking myself out, and I think this is a great book for a young teen audience looking for some gruesome thrills. I have to say that of any horror fiction, I find vampires the least scary, but this is an action packed horror that isn't too challenging.
Whiteout was released on 10th Jan 2019 by Little Tiger Group
Big thanks to Netgalley and the Publishers for the free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.