There's humor and fun behind 'The Gates'

FANTASY | Connolly doesn't write down to young readers

Some scientists fear that once the Large Hadron Collider, that 17-mile racetrack for subatomic particles buried deep beneath the mountains of Switzerland and France, really gets going, it may create a black hole that will swallow the Earth.

Thriller writer John Connolly reconfigures this fear into his first children’s novel, The Gates (Atria, 304 pages, $24). Connolly does have the Hadron Collider bring the world to the brink of destruction, though not via black hole. Instead the collider opens a transdimensional portal between the Earth and hell. Satan, who goes by the title The Great Malevolence, has waited millennia for this opportunity to lay waste to the Earth.

But his wait isn’t quite over. It will take another three days — until Halloween, of course — for the portal to grow wide enough to allow the gates of hell to swing open. While Satan twiddles his malevolent thumbs, humanity’s only hope is 12-year-old Samuel Johnson, accompanied by his faithful dachshund, Boswell (students of English literature will get the joke).

Samuel notices mysterious blue lights coming from the basement of the Abernathy home at 666 Crowley Avenue. Samuel spies through the window just in time to see demons possess the bodies of the Abernathys, who weren’t that nice to begin with. Samuel has no idea how one boy from the sleepy English hamlet of Biddlecombe can hold back the forces of hell, but he may get help from a lumbering demon named Nurd who is tired of getting zapped between dimensions.

Connolly was best known for detective novels before he wrote The Book of Lost Things, a fairy tale aimed at grownups that crossed over to the young adult market. The Gates is intended for even younger readers, though it contains ample material that will make teens and adults smile. It is Madeline L’Engle by way of Douglas Adams.

L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, a book that featured angels, drew upon contemporary scientific theory about tesseracts and such. Connolly does likewise in his book about devils, explaining much of the story’s scientific basis in a series of witty footnotes that reveal, among other things, that our galaxy tastes of raspberries and smells of rum.

Even though Connolly is Irish, he writes in the droll, off-handed absurdism generally called British humor. Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is the clearest literary comparison but not the only influence. A conversation between Samuel and a demon under his bed reads like a Monty Python sketch.

A lighthearted romp such as this doesn’t require tight plotting, but at the halfway point Connolly decides to toss in characters and episodes that do nothing to push the story forward. Although Samuel is introduced as a loner, he suddenly gains two best mates with personalities awfully similar to Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.  Connolly probably introduced these characters to spoof the Harry Potter books, but the attempt goes nowhere.

Satan’s coming is heralded by the arrival of a demon horde that proves less powerful than horror movies would indicate. This series of demon attacks are comical at first, but grow repetitive. By making hell’s advance guard so inept, Connolly sacrifices tension for laughs. Also, many of these episodes involve incidental characters and keep Samuel offstage too long.

The Gates is a fun book and an awfully funny one, as well. Connolly never writes down to his young readers and trusts they will appreciate the scientific theories and literary references he uses as building blocks. The sole disappointment is that Connolly just misses the chance to tell a story as thrilling as it is amusing.

Jeffrey Westhoff is a local free-lance writer and film critic.