The Great Outer Dark

Volume XXX / Issue 37 - May 31 / 2024

The Great Outer Dark

Author: 
David Neil Lee
Series: 
Midnight Games Trilogy; Bk. 3
Hamilton, ON: Poplar Press/Wolsak and Wynn, 2023
247 pp., trade pbk., $15.00
ISBN: 
9781989496602
Grades: 
Grades 7 and up
Ages: 
Ages 12 and up
Review by: 
Review by Ronald Hore
4
Excerpt: 

What the hell was even happening? The last time I’d been here, by my personal calendar, was a little over one week ago, at night in a March blizzard. I’d thought I was sneaking into an old warehouse, but it wasn’t a building, it was an airship – Sorcerer. The next thing I knew, we were hovering over a Pacific inlet on the west coast and then shortly afterwards, to get us out of a jam, Sorcerer had opened up a thing called a continuum threshold which had taken us to another planet – R’lyhnygoth, home of the Great Old Ones.

Right, that was the key. Dammit, brain, start working! All I could remember was that at this other place, R’lyhnygoth, time ran differently- in the space of one minute there, forty minutes went by on Earth. Now I was back, but because the week I had been gone included a few days on R’lyhnygoth, it was three months later on Earth. I’d left during a blizzard and, coming back, fallen through a door that dumped me into Hamilton’s North End in thirty plus degree heat. I felt like a shrimp on a barbecue.

Narrated by our hero Nate, The Great Outer Dark concludes the “Midnight Games Trilogy” with the revival of a worse version of Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods in Hamilton, Ontario, and 16-year-old high school student Nate Silva’s attempts to foil them. Now a mysterious tower has risen in the centre of the city, and the situation is far worse, affecting most of the population, with monsters, human and otherwise, prowling the city. At least Nate’s mother is back, but now, because she spent so much time on Sorcerer, she is several years younger than his father. Escaping from the monsters in the tower on the dirigible, along with H.P. Lovecraft who is no longer human, Nate finds himself reluctantly leaving the craft by parachute high above the destruction of the central tower filled with monsters from another dimension. All’s well in the end as he stumbles, bruised and bleeding, into a house party with the members of the resistance, including his parents, who start a conversation about his plans for the next school year. If the reader enjoys unpronounceable nightmarish monsters, snarky teenage boys, and an assortment of interesting human characters, The Great Outer Dark might just be right for you.

Recommended
Reviewer: 

Ronald Hore, involved with writer’s groups for several years, dabbles in writing fantasy and science fiction in Winnipeg, Manitoba under the pen name R. J. Hore.