The World in Shadow continues the Eternal Warriors series which began with The War in Heaven, but it is not a conventionally straightforward sequel. The interplanetary, multidimensional war continues, but the story focuses on a very localized aspect of it, a small, but vicious battle developing in the home town of the series' central protagonists. The viewpoint is rather broader this time, as the reader witnesses events unfolding from three different perspectives, two human and one demonic. When a new player arrives in town, church leaders begin dropping dead, but it soon becomes clear that these attacks are nothing more than a diversion meant to conceal the true intentions of the Fallen archangel, Balazel.

There are clear echoes of the Columbine massacre here, centering on one sensitive boy growing increasingly desperate as his everyday abuse at the hands of the school's beautiful people becomes less and less endurable due to his deteriorating family situation and an unfilfilled search for romance. The sense of an unavoidable tragedy builds throughout the book, as the teens of the high school, mostly unaware of the dark spirits working against them, go about their lives and prepare for their upcoming summer vacation. The novel is written from an openly evangelical Christian perspective, but is, compared to most Christian fiction, unusually sober and not for nothing has it been classified as "dark fantasy" by more than one reviewer.

Style: The writing ranges from competent to very good, and there are distinct differences between the voices of the older boy, the younger girl, and the fallen angel. A brief detour into a neoJoycean stream of consciousness flow indicates that the author is not limited to the high teen level of the writing which otherwise comprises the book. The dialogue is good, although the banality of the high school students' everyday conversation is, while probably not overdone in terms of versimilitude, occasionally excessive. Despite suburban contemporay setting and a plot with some similarities to the thriller genre, the literary style remains firmly within the fantasy tradition.

Story: The World in Shadow features a gripping and compelling plot which leaves the reader in doubt throughout. There are strong elements of tragedy and vivid individual pain balanced by redemption and uplifting optimism, which combine to give the novel more depth than would generally be expected of a fantasy novel featuring teenage protagonists.

Characters: This is one of the real strengths of the novel, as the quiet, but growing hopelessness of the one human protagonist stands in stark contrast to the relatively carefree mindset of the other. Both are distinctly separate from the immortal perspective of the fallen angel, whose mood switches frequently between an understandable contempt for her mortal inferiors and fear of her ineffable superiors. What could have easily been a heavy-handed portrayal of "good" and "bad" characters is instead written with a light and sympathetic touch that helps breathe life into all three protagonists.

Creativity: Considering what is, for the fantasy genre, an unusual worldview, the book is not as original as it seems on first glance. The angels, both good and evil, are fairly basic and the high school life is so ordinary that it could be considered stereotypical. However, the novel does break the mold of the conventional "book two in the series" format and certainly does not come close to resembling any other book in the two genres from which it hails, fantasy or Christian fiction.

Text Sample: The suburban neighborhoods seemed all the same from within the windows of the car. Little clumps of trees flashed by the window, indistinct, devoid of all character except for the occasional birch tree standing out in thin white contrast to the dark evergreens and thickly towering oaks. Once, there had been elms lining the avenues, their massive branches reaching out to form a canopy of leaves over the street, but the image was only a dim one in Brien’s memory. They’d been gone for years, cut down in a desperate attempt to save the few that had not yet contracted the dreaded Dutch Elm disease.

He frowned as he drove, remembering how hard Mom had cried when Dad told her that the big elm in their front yard had to go; the tree crews had already marked it with the yellow paint of doom. It had seemed strange to him at the time, that Mom would shed tears for a tree. But now, he understood, at least a little. The white oak that they’d planted the next spring had reached a respectable size now, eleven years later. But the oaks, massive as they were, just couldn’t shade a street like the giant, sheltering elms. They populated a neighborhood, instead of defining it.

The neighborhoods at night seemed to be missing people as well as elms. There were plenty of lights on, of course, both inside and out, and every driveway had an extra car or two parked outside the two-car garages, but the only active sign of life was the eerie blue glow that flickered out of the ground floor windows of nearly every home. Some of the bigger houses boasted two glows, and a few even had three.

To Brien, driving here at night felt almost like an out-of-body experience, as if alien life-forms from some spectral planet had somehow caused all the people living here to vanish. He imagined strange blue beings of light squatting triumphantly in the empty living rooms of their victims, performing ghastly, ghostly, rituals of unspeakable evil, and he shivered.


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