The Dead

The back of the proof copy of this book gives the game away, even if you missed the grinning demon and the blood dripping from the title on the cover. This is Hodder’s answer to Darren Shan and will be accompanied by a ‘guerrilla marketing campaign’ to ‘position against’ the master of teenage gore. I don’t know what that will involve. Will someone pop up on Shan’s website waving an I Love David Gatward placard? But it will take a guerrilla marketer with the genius and stamina of Mao to threaten Shan now. Gatward’s publicity photo looks the kind of man a father could trust to take his daughter to a heavy metal gig rather than the OFSTED employee he was most recently. He’s done a decent enough job of stepping into Shan’s very far from dead shoes by conjuring and then exploding in spectacular and messy ways, the usual vile, rotting, deformed, slimy, treacherous denizens of the circles of hell that have this time disturbed the quiet life of nearly 16-year-old Lazarus (who might have asked some questions about the significance of his name before now). If Shan’s books themselves are already a deathly exercise in going through the motions, then here the motions have become creepily zombie-like. Could the smell of rotting flesh be the smell of long expired material exhumed one too many times? There are two more books in this series to come. By then, it will be clear whether the Shan regime is in any danger of succumbing to this assault from the Shades of Shan.