Oblivion

And so it comes to this, the final volume in a series that I started reading some twenty years ago. Back then, I picked up a copy of The Devil's Doorbell in my school library, knowing Anthony Horowitz only from the Diamond Brothers series of comic noir detective stories. The gripping horror novel that followed took me by surprise, and may have been responsible for my interest in horror thereafter (I hadn't much cared for it before).

I devoured the book, and the next two in the Pentagram series: The Night of the Scorpion and The Silver Citadel (which also provided the name for a recurring antagonist for my PCs - Evelyn Carnate). Sadly, the school library never picked up a copy of The Day of the Dragon and the fifth book in the series was never published at all.

I had more or less given up on ever knowing how the story ended, when Anthony Horowitz - better known now for the Alex Rider series of teenage spy novels - published a book called Raven's Gate, which I was asked to review for Write Away, and much to my surprise I found that - with the exception of a few character names, and some extra mobile phones and modern references - what I was reading was The Devil's Doorbell.

Five books later, and with some changes - minor and major - to the original material, we come to the missing conclusion: Oblivion, in which the Five - five children with incredible powers, destined to stand against the Old Ones - must reach the final confrontation in Oblivion, the fortress of the King of the Old Ones, in the frozen wastes of Antarctica.

In a bold move, Horowitz splits up his protagonists and runs four-to-five stories in turn throughout the book, one told in the first person - a major shift for the series - by a new character who, ultimately, is revealed as the overall narrator of the series in their in-universe form as the history of the Five. None of the narratives are pretty, and most are in fact extremely dark, as the Five find themselves jumped forward to a world in the grip of the Old Ones, full of misery and much inflicted by humanity upon itself.

The story winds through adventure, fear, loss and betrayal, and each of the Five is forced to draw on their own strengths to win through, even if the strength that they need is the strength to fall. There is also a good mechanism to motivate the villains without making them seem foolish: Killing one of the Five replaces them at once with an alternative version who is an unknown quantity, thus they seek instead to capture them, with the risks that that entails.

It's a strong ending to a strong series.