How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Not bad
Advantages:
Decent writing style, easy to read
Disadvantages:
Odd mix of storybook characters, just not as good as it could have been
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Fourteen-year-old Nest Freemark has always known that she is different. Different in many ways: that she lives with her grandparents after her mother committed suicide, not knowing who her father is. That her best friend is a sylvan - a woodland elf-like creature, a few inches high, who rides around the park on an owl’s back. And that she can see the feeders in the park. Feeders are all teeth and yellow eyes, waiting to devour the negative emotions of humans - and quite possibly the humans themselves. Nest sees them when no one else can - swarming in the shadows, waiting…
Terry Brooks is famous for his Shannara series and its various offshoots, what might be called ‘high fantasy’. This is his first book set in the ‘real’ world - well, real as in set in present day USA, although the appearance of demons and magic might debate that title!
Starting to read this, the first thing that came to mind was Stephen King - I found this fairly reminiscent of a lot of King’s work, with the evil-hits-a-sleepy-town, a child as the main character, and the mix of ‘reality’ and fantasy. This isn’t a mix that will sit well with all fans of the Shannara series, though. Personally I find it a pleasant break from Middle Earth and its many reflections of the past half-century.
So we find ourselves in the small town of Hopewell, USA, home of aforementioned Nest Freemark (why the silly name I’m not sure, but there you go). Nest leads a strange but not entirely unhappy life. What discontent she suffers comes from knowing that she is different and set apart from her peer group. However, she does have a group of friends, and grandparents who love and care for her. Nest’s ‘gifts’ are passed down the female line of her family, so her grandmother knows about and shares some of Nest’s talents - the ability to see the nasty, crawly feeders, for instance. And Nest does have a best friend: Pick the sylvan, a forest creature who co-opts Nest into helping him care for the park.
The park is one of the central elements of this story. In fact, the tale is so centralised on the park that it is hard to imagine the inhabitants interacting much with the outside world. From the fairly ordinary, every-day life of a small American town, it is in the park that the magic appears and the action takes place. So from Stephen King, my mind wandered more towards children’s fiction, the kind where an otherwise ordinary-seeming place is actually full of magic and danger, that perhaps only the children know about.
To begin with, the only danger is from the feeders. Although nasty, they are not inherently evil - they feed on negative emotion, so really, they are creations of the evil of mankind. Problems arise, however, as the more there is to feed on, the more feeders which come into existence. And once the feeders start to feed from a human, they encourage more negativity, seeking more to feed on.
An example of this forms one of the opening chapters of the book. Nest is woken by Pick, the sylvan guardian of the park, to help rescue a little runaway child. Escaping an unhappy home, the girl’s fear and misery attract the feeders. Although invisible to the child, they are amplifying her emotions, driving her into a darker circle of thought. Nest finds her standing at the edge of a cliff, surrounded by creepy feeders… Ooh, go on, read it to find out what happens! Nest, although not invincible, has some small power over the feeders - if she can make eye contact, she can kill them with her magic. It’s a convenient skill, but Brooks doesn’t overplay it, and Nest is never seen as some kind of indestructible superhero figure.
Nest’s magic, however, soon draws more deadly foes into Hopewell. Although Nest is the main focus to the events, it could be argued that the central character is actually John Ross, a ‘Knight of the Word’. Now, perhaps I should explain a bit about the ‘theology’ of this book. What we have, girls and boys, is the Word and the Void. Good and Evil, if you prefer, or even Creation and Destruction. As a Knight of the Word, John Ross has the curious talent of living in two times at once - or rather, he lives in the present, but when he sleeps he finds himself in a dark, post-apocalyptic future. His task is to stop the events he sees in those ‘dreams’ from becoming reality, by changing events now.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t an entirely original thought - what is these days? - but here I think it works really well. The visions Ross sees in his dreams are kept brief, and are perhaps a little too melodramatic on the evilness scale, but it does add a sense of urgency and need to his actions in the present day.
In Running with the Demon, John Ross crosses paths with Nest Freemark while chasing a demon. It’s what he does, you know. The demon is a rather nasty creature, but it seemed to me that for the most part it was a rather petty, small-scale kind of an evilness. The demon can appear in human form, but more often makes itself ‘blend in’, become so familiar looking that people don’t really notice it. From this position, it then goes about making almost subliminal suggestions to people, pushing them towards doing ‘naughty’ things.
Oh, all right. Things do get a little more evil than that. Causing little old ladies to have heart attacks in church, for instance. Or trying to set free a very scary creature of pure destruction, trapped for centuries in a massive oak tree. And… taunting Nest. For some reason, the demon - and John Ross, for that matter - seem very interested in little Nest Freemark. Will she discover why?
The main flaw I found with this novel was the balance between Nest’s story and that of John Ross. The impression was that Ross was the more important character, yet he remains slightly mysterious. The flashbacks - him telling his own story - are… dull. Well, I found them so anyway. Actually, not so much dull as entirely misplaced, an American’s view of England and too much of a fairy story creeping in. It also seems to take an eternity of little snippets to actually tell us anything.
Fortunately, the main flow of the tale followed Nest and was reasonably successful. The marriage of elements was a little hard to take at times - although the story holds them together in the main, I kept thinking that demons and forest creatures seemed from slightly different genres. In fact, the character of Pick, the sylvan, I would have left in a children’s novel, which this is not.
Actually, it is perhaps that meeting of Stephen King and a children’s tale that left me most undecided about this book. It wasn’t as dark as King, but too much for youngsters, and those in the middle are least likely to take to the forest imp element, I suspect. If you can suspend disbelief, roll with the story, there is a fair amount to be enjoyed in this book. The characters themselves were pleasing, especially that most of the supporting cast was pretty well fleshed out.
Overall, this is an imperfect but pretty enjoyable novel. It just manages to rise above the ‘agreeable junk’ level, but I don’t see it destined to become a huge classic.
There are two further books in this series: A Knight of the Word, and Angel Fire East. Both are already published - thankfully, as I’m getting sick of waiting for ends of series! Having now read both, I can say that the series does improve a little, and I'd recommend the trilogy a little more than just this book on it's own.
