Raven's Gate by Anthony Horowitz

Matthew Freeman shows all the signs. Orphaned at a young age and forced to live with uncaring relatives, good-looking and black-haired, Matt has a history of strange things happening around him. It’s obvious that he’s destined for great things – provided he isn’t used as a human sacrifice first.

Anthony Horowitz’s Raven’s Gate opens with no sense of the supernatural: Matt is involved in a warehouse break-in that goes bad when his companion stabs the security guard. Instead of running for it, Matt insists on staying with the man; he doesn’t want to be responsible for a death. But during the course of the novel, many people die because of Matt. Mostly people who want to help him.

To avoid a court sentence, Matt volunteers for a new government plan known as LEAF – Liberty and Education Achieved through Fostering – and is sent to the country for some hard work and fresh air. He realises very quickly that something is rotten in Lower Malling – it takes him a while longer to admit that’s because the inhabitants are witches.

In Raven’s Gate, witches are eviler than they have been in a long time. No congenial old professors for Horowitz: these are old-fashioned witches, the kind that make disgusting potions and recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards for their spells, and try to summon up ancient demonic beings – the ‘Old Ones’. It’s an odd choice for evil in a young adult book; the traditional witch is such a ridiculous idea that it’s hard to take seriously. But Horowitz’s witches are scary, and the sense that Matt is helpless to stop them is a strong one.

Whilst Raven’s Gate is an intense and engaging book, it’s hard to relate to the characters. Matt himself, with his criminal antics isn’t the most likeable of characters, but everybody who tries to help him ends up dying. The nice policeman. The farmer who tries to help him escape. He even watches the sceptical but sympathetic journalist get caught in a ribcage when they’re trying to escape a museum filled with animate dinosaurs. But it’s no accident the people who care for Matt die – even the death of his parents several years ago was planned.

For all that Matt is obviously fated to be one of mankind’s saviours, there is very little magic from him in the novel, and this is a good thing. It’s only at the end of the novel that he gains some measure of control over his powers, and by then you think he’s earned it. It’s rather overshadowed by the nuclear explosion anyway.

Raven’s Gate is the first in a series of five called, appropriately, The Power of Five. It’s also a rewrite of a series he began over twenty years ago and never finished. Most of the book has been completely rewritten, and the protagonist was even given a new name. Re-reading the first novel, The Devil’s Doorbell, it had struck Horowitz that though the writing was ‘rather poor’, the ideas were more relevant than they were when the series was first written. Good and evil are bigger than they were twenty years ago, in our post-911 world. But a lot of the evil in Raven’s Gate seems to be mindless malevolence.

We’re never entirely sure why a whole village of witches would want to call up a bunch of evil to ravage the world. What’s in it for them? And why do the Old Ones want to wipe out humanity anyway? Perhaps these are things that will be explored more later in the series, and as much of the first book is Matt is simply trying to survive, perhaps we can forgive him for not being a little more philosophical.