I was having a conversation with a friend about a book by John Connolly which I recently bought a copy of, The Book of Lost Things, and went off into somewhat of a rant and decided that it would be an idea to talk about why John Connolly is my favourite author here.

John Connolly has written quite a few novels, his most well-known likely being his crime ones, but they aren't what I want to talk about. I've read one of his detective stories, and I quite enjoyed it, along with a few horror stories he wrote. But the book that has always stood out to me as my favourite from his works, my favourite book overall too, is The Gates.

The Gates is a story about a boy named Samuel, and his pet dog, who discover that their new neighbours in house 666 are planning to open a door to [heck], and release various demons, on the night after Halloween. It balances humour with horror and serious scenes, with footnotes and references to art, theoretical physics and religion (if you aren't particularly religious, you might well enjoy the mentions of religion. If you are, you may not). From that little description alone, you can tell that it could so easily go horribly wrong, and yet, in my opinion at least, it doesn't. It manages to be funny and serious, and its style is quite quirky and humorous (the chapter titles are joking previews of the chapter's contents, and some can be rather long; the footnotes too are funny, but not always, sometimes preferring to give some interesting information about things mentioned in the story). The beginning isn't cheesy or overdone, and the motives of the neighbours are more realistic than my summary would suggest. They aren't evil cultists, they're just ordinary adults with boring lives who get themselves into something big and dangerous as a result.

Another book by Connolly with a similar 'feeling' to The Gates is The Book of Lost Things. It, too, follows a boy, named David, but beyond the boy becoming involved in an adventure that matures him somewhat there aren't all that many similarities (except in the writing style, which replaces references to science with references to fairy tales and footnotes with slightly altered versions of stories we all know well). In The Gates, while what occurs is obviously something that wouldn't happen in our reality, yet is very much the truth in the book, The Book of Lost Things never truly explains whether or not what takes place in it genuinely happens. David has OCD, and at the start of the book he loses his mother, which sets everything up for what occurs later. David's mother had always read to him as a child, and told him that books were living things too, and after her death David begins to 'hear' the books talking among themselves, and the worlds of fantasy and reality begin to get more and more blurred as time passes. The loss of his mother is soon followed by his father 'replacing' her with Rose, one of the nurses who had taken care of his mother while she was ill, which doesn't help him much, and he begins to drift away from his father due to his hatred of Rose and dislike of his recently born half-brother, Georgie, taking refuge in the fairy tales he knew as a young child. The story changes quite a bit around this time, but I've spoiled enough already for those who might want to read it, so I won't go on. Both The Gates and The Book of Lost Things are great stories, which I would very much recommend. The Gates has a sequel, but I haven't read it yet and it doesn't look massively promising so I can't make any guarantees about it. It's likely a good read -- most things by John Connolly are -- but what I would worry is that it wouldn't be as good as The Gates.

Worth noting is that The Book of Lost Things is a lot more serious than The Gates -- expect little, if any, humour from it. Even the most lighthearted scene in the book is dark in its own right.

Anyway, that's a little about my favourite author and two of my favourite books, so yeah.

- Vorex