#17 The Gates

The Gates is written by John Connolly. He has also written many other books. His common genre is anything to do with death, from “the gates” of hell to someone dying of old age. This book takes place in an everyday town on the week before Halloween.

The main characters are Samuel Johnson, Nurd, and Ba’al- A.K.A Mrs Abernathy. Samuel is a really bright kid. He has some friends, a dachshund named boswell, and some crazy neighbors. Nurd is a demon who was sent into banishment, by the Great Malevolence( Satan, the Devil whichever you prefer). He is bored by everything in banishment, until he is somehow sucked into the human world. Ba’al is one of the Great Malevolence’s most powerful agents, she is one of the only demons to have actually met the Great Malevolence.

Samuel decides to go trick or treating on October 28, to get a head start on the rest of the world. He meets the Abernathys who are do an evil chant to summon evil demons from beyond, when they do one devours each of them, to help accomplish the Great Malevolence’s commands. As Sam realizes that things are about to go horribly wrong he calls on his friends to help stop the rampage on Earth, all the while he makes friends with Nurd who promises to find a way to put a stop to all of the chaos. The reason for all of this chaos is from a particle accelerator. The Great Malevolence decided to infuse some of it’s power into the accelerator’s particles, so when the particles collided one escaped and created a portal in the Abernathy’s basement. Then the demons took over their bodies to do the Great Malevolence’s bidding.

This book was very short. It was an easy read for me, but I really liked it. There were concepts that they talked about in the book that were complicated, and mostly about science, but if you ignore the foot notes it shouldn’t bother you much. I would recomend this book to anyone who beileves in the Devil in a simpler way than the whole torture and death thing.