ZapTown

Last month was quite a busy one, and it seems apt to take some time this  holiday weekend and start to share some of the books I’m reading during the Summer months. If you’ve been reading this space for a while, you’ll know that one of my favorite times for catching up with books I’ve been meaning to read, or trying out new authors blind.

Well, now that we’re into July, I’ve had my first  pleasant surprise for the Summer of 2010. This is due to a novel called ‘The Gates‘ by John Connolly, an Irish writer whose last novel, The Book of Lost Things, I also enjoyed. The Gates is the sort of book that I would have loved to read when I was ten or so and my imagination was firing on all cylinders–it’s about a boy who has to save the world from the local coven who ‘accidentally’ open a gate to hell, while also managing to be about the Large Hadron Collider and quantum physics. The tale itself is a darkly humorous one, and the demons, for all the loving descriptions Connolly uses, are not that threatening.

The heroes of the book are a young boy named Samuel Johnson and his dog Boswell, and the story begins with them stumbling over the demonic plot while Trick – or Treating. The plot unspools from there, with Sam trying to alert others fruitlessly to the fact that his neighbors have been replaced with demons and are planning to take advantage of the LHC to ‘open the gates’ so to speak, between Hell and Earth. In other hands, this might come across as grim and epic as, say, Stephen King’s The Stand. Connolly, however, has a very light touch, and the resulting tale that he spins has more in common with something like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s  Good Omens.

It is, pardon the term, a family-friendly apocalypse, and one that manages to find a happy ending. The prose is light and whimsical, the chemistry between the young hero and his dog is charming, and the cover, festooned with all sorts of fangs and spikes, will definitely stand out if you take it to the beach with you. It is, in other words, just the right type of book for the season. Here’s hoping I’m as lucky with the next few novels I have stacked  on the shelf to keep me company while I’m in the hammock.