The Nightmare Factory

There is a point in this book when one character says to another, ‘That was unreal, mate, you’re like Harry Potter or something’. And he’s clearly got it right. Here there is a world that exists beside our own, and a malevolent villain from this other dimension bent on the triumph of evil who can be stopped only by a young boy and his friends. However, this book has its own different premise: that our nightmares can be harvested and released back to destroy us. L A Jones builds on this to give us an adventure involving capture, imprisonment and escape, battles with monsters, and transforming potions and superpowers. Each chapter ends on a cliff-hanger which is, in the way of these things, often rather disappointingly resolved at the beginning of the next. But the pace doesn’t let up and if you want a page turner that borrows some ideas from those old Choose Your Own Adventure stories (surely there was a Mountain of Doom there too), you won’t be disappointed. To paraphrase the former Governor of California, ‘There will be sequels’.