DARKSIDE

Fourteen-year-old Jonathan Sterling's secretive father lies in a hospital, mad and sick. This sets Jonathan, a truant student, on a mission to discover his father's hidden past. References to "the darkness" lead him to a library, where he meets Mary Anne, who has white skin, purple hair, and sedating perfume. She promises to lead him to Darkside, a hidden world beneath London. Colin Moody is chillingly convincing in this portrayal, and his narration becomes mysterious and forbidding as we follow Jonathan underground. Moody highlights Jonathan's desperation to understand, and then escape, the treacherous nineteenth-century world he finds there, which is peopled with vampires and ghouls. Particularly strong is Moody's growling depiction of a P.I. "wereman" who nearly eats Jonathan before becoming his friend. S.W. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2008]