Hidden Pictures

Okay… creepy kid drawings? Say no more.

Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak hooked me pretty quickly. Mallory takes a job as a nanny for a little boy named Teddy, and everything seems pretty normal at first. Then Teddy starts drawing pictures.

And those pictures get WEIRD.

What starts out as innocent little kid drawings slowly turns into something much darker, and I loved how the illustrations were actually part of the story. There's something especially creepy about turning the page and seeing exactly what Mallory is seeing. It made the whole thing feel a little more real—and a lot more unsettling.

Of course, I immediately started making theories about what was happening. Ghost? Murder? Creepy kid? Completely unreliable adults? I changed my mind more than once.

Mallory isn't a perfect character, which I actually liked. She's trying to rebuild her life while figuring out whether something supernatural is happening around her or whether she can even trust what she's seeing. That uncertainty kept me reading.

A few things toward the end didn't quite land for me, and you definitely have togo along with some of it. But did I stay up reading because I needed to know what those drawings meant?

Yep.

Creepy, twisty, strange, and VERY easy to fly through.