Book Log: Revealers, The Devouring

[penmage]

Revealers by Amanda Marrone

Jules, Dani, Zahara, Sascha and Margo may look like typical teenagers, but typical teenagers don’t ride around on broomsticks in the dark of night, cast hexes at each other, or vanquish the forces of darkness. Jules and her friends are Revealers, members of a coven of witches who exist to drive back the dark forces. By day, they’re regular high school students, but at night, the hunt down supernatural baddies and force them to reveal their true nature before vanquishing them.

When the girls turn eighteen, they are to be initiated into the coven’s inner circle, where they will learn the secrets of the coven. Jules is pretty excited to be initiated, but when her friends go through their initiation, it’s clear that something is deadly wrong. Jules is the youngest, and therefore the last, but she knows that she needs to start finding out the coven’s secrets now, before the secrets tear her friends apart.

This book kept me up at night reading. I could not put it down. The writing is tight, the story is snappy, and the witches are engaging. There’s none of the cheesy Charmed-style witch stuff that would have turned me off this kind of book—it’s like Charmed meets Buffy, and Revealers takes the good parts of both and leaves the annoying parts behind.

Jules and her friends are great characters, and I loved the female bonding. Some of the guy stuff was a little over the top, and the ending felt a little flat—but I suspect (hope!) that is because there is a sequel in the works. It certainly left room for it. And it’s not a cliffhanger—things are certainly tied up at the end, which is nice.

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The Devouring by Simon Holt

Regina Halloway loves scary stories. She reads them compulsively--she even works in a horror book store. Sometimes, she thinks she might be reading them to distract her from the truly scary things in her life--like the fact that her mom ran out on them, and they haven't heard from her in over a year, or the fact that her father is more and more distant every day. Or the fact that she is singlehandedly raising her little brother, Henry.

But mostly, Reggie just reads horror because she loves it. And when she finds an old journal called The Devouring, she brings it home and reads it. It tells of creatures called Vours that can attack people through their fears, and then inhabit their bodies. They come into our world on Sorry Night, the eve of the winter solstice.

Naturally, Reggie and her best friend Aaron can't resist summoning the Vours on Sorry Night. But they aren't the ones who are possessed--instead, Reggie's little brother Henry starts acting stranger and stranger, until Reggie realizes that he's not Henry anymore--he's something older and darker. Something terrifying.

To save her brother, Reggie will have to face her deepest fears.

The writing in this book is not strong, and it nearly lost me with its clunkiness in the first couple of chapters. It felt a little cliche and tired, and I could predict exactly what would happen.

But then the horror starts, and damned if this book isn't scary. It's truly, terrifyingly scary. At one point, I almost had to stop reading and take a breath.

So it's not a work of great literature. What it is is a top notch teen horror novel. Fans of Darren Shan will eat this up.

A warning--though this book does have a satisfying ending, it's the jumping-off point of a series, and is open-ended. I definitly want to read more.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I love horror too, and The Devouring is on my library stack. I will definitely indulge!
--Laini