READING : The Devouring by Simon Holt

When Reggie finds an old journal and reads about the Vours, supernatural creatures who feast on fear and attack on the eve of the winter solstice, she assumes they are just the musings of some lunatic author. But soon, they become a terrifying reality when she begins to suspect that her timid younger brother might be one of their victims.Risking her life and her sanity, Reggie enters a living nightmare to save the people she loves. Can she devour own her fears before they devour her?

There were stories we used to tell each other when we were kids, for the mere purpose to scare the living crap out of the other person so he or she couldn't sleep at night.I remember trying to come up with these dreadful and creepy creatures,taking into account the other person's fear and taking advantage of it accordingly.

The Devouring is one of those stories.

Reggie is a 15 year old girl, who comes from a broken home:her mother abandoned her and her 8 year old brother a year before the beginning of the story.Apparently, she got scared and run away.Or maybe she was too selfish and she wanted to live her life free of responsibilities.We never really find out why she did it.

The book is basically describing Reggie's struggle to keep her family together after her brother's been taken by Vours, evil smoke-like entities who possess your body and pretend to be you.She loves her brother and she will do anything to get him back, struggling to keep what it's left of her family together.So, she enters the world of the Vours, where her brother's soul is.A psychedelic world,where your worst nightmares and fears come alive.But the more you fear, the more the Vour gets stronger,and Reggie has only one chance to get herself and her brother out of there,before they both lose themselves in the Vour world.

I enjoyed reading The Devouring very much!Don't expect great character developments and many touchy feely scenes,this is a horror book after all, but the story behind it is fantastic!Black smokes, spiders, evil carnivals and clowns(that's freaking scary,right there!),graveyards, elevator coffins, anything you can possibly imagine and are scared of, are in this book.If Stephen King wrote a book when he was a teenager, it could easily be The Devouring!

If you're up for a good horror story, don't miss this one!

One useful tip:don't mistake this book for Young Adult.It belongs to the Horror genre and much deservingly so,since it contains explicit descriptions of gory and macabre scenes.

3,5/5