Raven's Gate

Raven's Gate

First earlier US edition
Author	Anthony Horowitz
Cover artist	London England
Language	English
Series	The Power of Five
Release number	1st in series
Genre	Horror, Fantasy novel
Publisher	Walker Books (UK)
Publication date	1 August 2005 (UK) 1 June 2005 (US)
Media type	Print Paperback
Pages	270 pp
ISBN	1-84428-619-3 (Paperback edition)
OCLC	224729113
Followed by	Evil Star

Raven's Gate is the first book in The Power of Five series, written by Anthony Horowitz. It was published and released in the United Kingdom on 1 August 2005, by Walker Books Ltd and in the United States (1 June 2005) by Scholastic Press under the adjusted series title The Gatekeepers. It is followed by Evil Star, released in 2006, Nightrise in 2007, and Necropolis in 2008, with the final book Oblivion in 2012.

Plot[]

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Fourteen-year-old delinquent Matthew 'Matt' Freeman and his seventeen-year-old friend Kelvin Johnson break into an Ipswich warehouse late at night, to steal electrical products but are caught by the one security guard in the building. Matt is shocked and is about to confess, but Kelvin sneaks up behind the guard and stabs him in the back, leaving him for dead. Matt tries to get help but the police come, arrest Matt and Kelvin, and take the wounded man to a hospital.

In the police station, Kelvin blames Matt for the man's stabbing and Matt is taken by police for his version of the event. A young black police detective, Superintendent Stephen Mallory, comes up and interviews him, and finds Matt to be likeable. Then, later on in the night, Mallory meets Matt's aunt, Gwenda Davis, to talk about Matt. Matt wakes up, seemingly dying of thirst. In a sudden trance, Matt stares hard at a glass jug of water, smells burning, and stares in amazement when the jug explodes, even though he is ten feet away. He is amazed for a while, but then he goes back to sleep; upon waking up the next morning, he sees no evidence to suggest that the glass exploded, leaving him thinking it was just an odd dream.

In the next week, Matt is given a role in the Liberty and Education Achieved through Fostering (LEAF) Project, designed for teenage delinquents who are being reassimilated into society. Mallory is involved with the project and he introduces Matt to his new guardian, Jayne Deverill, an old, strict woman who Matt immediately dislikes.

Matt and Jayne Deverill go to Hive Hall, Deverill's home somewhere in Yorkshire, and she gets him to fit in. But she seems attracted to him in a sinister way when she sees his blood fall on the floor after her cat bites his hand. Matt faints, become ill with pneumonia, and has a nightmare in which he sees Deverill and a woman who looks like her cure him with dark magic. Matt doesn't know what to believe, but he feels different and more confident following his recovery. Deverill gets him to work on her farm with her evil farmhand Noah, who is threatening and silent, as well as seeming mentally damaged. Early on, Matt is sent to Lesser Malling, the local village, to get something from the chemist, and he meets Jayne Deverill's sister, Claire, who is disfigured with a birthmark covering half of her face; it later transpires that she was the other woman Matt saw in his vision. Claire and the other villagers come out and they are revealed to be all either disfigured or insane, or both. A seemingly normal man, Tom Burgess, comes up and tries to be friendly with Matt, but he warns him to leave the village before harm happens to him.

That night, Matt is woken up by a mysterious chanting in the woods. He searches the house for money, determined to leave, and then the cat attacks. He cages it in a log basket and searches for money. But he finds, to his horror, that Jayne Deverill somehow has a picture of him when he was eight years old at his parent's funeral. They died on the way to a wedding that Matt didn't want to attend. Somehow, he knew they were going to die, but he stayed at his neighbour's house and let them go to the wedding; en route, they died in a car accident, when a tyre blew out and the car ended up in a river. The photos appeared to be taken by a camera, but Matt thought that no photos were taken. He also finds a secret police report about him marked CONFIDENTIAL, stating that he has precognitive abilities. He decides to leave immediately, empty-handed and takes the bicycle that belonged to Jayne Deverill's late husband, Henry. To Matt's disbelief, each lane he takes in order to try and leave takes him back the way he came. Frustrated, he gives up and starts back on the way to Hive Hall.

In the woods the following day, Matt once again meets Tom Burgess by an old experimental nuclear power station, Omega One, who tells him to come to his farmhouse the next day and he will help him leave. Burgess gives Matt a pendant with a key etched on it, saying it unlocks the maze of roads, which it seem to do, breaking the 'spell' on the roads in the local area. Matt goes to Burgess's farm, Glendale Farm, the next day, only to find the farmer dead, murdered by some sort of animal, and the place in a wreck with the words "Raven's Gate" painted on the bedroom wall. He runs out and finds a police car, and tries to convince the policemen in the car of what happened. They go back to Glendale Farm and, to Matt's surprise, it is all neat again. Two of the villagers, including Joanna Creevy (whom Matt had met in Lesser Malling) are in there, and she seems to have rearranged everything, erased all traces of the murder, and Tom Burgess' body has vanished completely.

Frustrated, Matt leaves to go to Greater Malling, and he goes online to search about Raven's Gate. But another man named Dravid contacts him in a pop-up box, asking about him. Matt doesn't know what to say so he asks who Dravid is, then Dravid leaves the chat room. Matt meets a journalist named Richard Cole, at the offices of the town newspaper, The Greater Malling Gazette. He tells him the story of what happened, but Richard doesn't believe him either. Matt storms out of the Gazette in anger; to his shock, Jayne Deverill is waiting outside. She takes him back to Hive Hall and accuses him of fabricating his story, saying that Tom Burgess never died, and she even gets 'him' to call on the phone, even though he is dead. Matt, knowing that something weird is going on, listens to the voice of Burgess, then hangs up and goes to bed.

The next day, Stephen Mallory pays a visit. Mallory says he is there to check up on him and he is shocked by how ill and thin Matt looks, as well as signs of an earlier altercation with Noah. He gets into an argument with Deverill, accusing her of breaking the law by working Matt to the bone and keeping him out of school, and says he will have her arrested and have Matt put in other care. Mallory drives back to London, but he hears unearthly whispering in his car radio, on every station, and the car speeds up by itself and topples over a motorway bridge and smashes into a lorry, killing Mallory. (In reality, Mallory had visited Hive Hall after researching Matt's case, including interviewing Kelvin before his trial and visiting the neighbour Matt stayed with when he was orphaned, and discovering that Jayne Deverill had been pursued by a drug addict and mugger on the day she was given custody of Matt; the man in question later committed suicide, unwillingly. He also heard of Matt saying that Tom Burgess had been murdered at Glendale Farm.)

Matt is awoken by Deverill who tells him about Mallory's death, driving Matt into depression. Then he tries to escape when he sees that Jayne and Claire Deverill are going out. He follows them, into the woods, and sees a dark magic ritual there. He tries to eavesdrop, but triggers a security alarm and Jayne Deverill summons two black demon dogs which chase him through the woods and then he is finally trapped in a bog. But Richard Cole suddenly appears and rescues him. Richard kills the dogs by incinerating them, and he and Matt go to Richard's flat in York. Richard hears Matt's full story, and Matt thinks the villagers are witches, at which Richard laughs.

Richard phones Sir Michael Marsh, a government scientist who helped design, operate and close Omega One, and Susan Ashwood, a medium, whose mother, Elizabeth, wrote about Raven's Gate. Sir Michael Marsh is ostensibly boring, and explains to Matt and Richard about how nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants work, and how the villagers could not have uranium, despite Matt thinking he saw men in radiation suits, carrying uranium boxes. Afterwards, they visit Susan Ashwood in Manchester and deduce that although she seems good, she is thoroughly mad. Finally, Richard calls Dravid himself who works at the British Museum. Dravid agrees to meet and he tells them about the villagers.

Long ago, the world was ruled by the Old Ones, who were demons of pure evil. They killed many people and waged war against humanity, but were banished by five children. The children are expected to return when the Old Ones break out, which is what Jayne Deverill and the rest of the villagers are seeking to do. Dravid also explains that Lesser Malling was once home to a gate to the Old Ones' prison, and that the villagers intend to have Matt ritually sacrificed in order to bring them back and rule the world.

Dravid is killed by dark magic that brings the skeletons of dinosaurs in the museum to life. Jayne Deverill captures Richard and Matt and she takes them to Lesser Malling for the sacrifice. Matt escapes by creating a hole in the floor of his room, and tricking Noah to fall through it and get knocked out; however, Noah is killed when he impales himself on his own weapon. But Sir Michael Marsh drives up and suddenly betrays Matt by revealing himself as the coven leader, the man responsible for building the Omega One power station, over the site of the Stone Circle (Raven's Gate), that separates the prison of the Old Ones from our world. He takes Matt to the power station for the sacrifice. The Deverill sisters and all the villagers are there and they try to kill Matt, unleashing a portal to the Old Ones' dimension and a huge dark creature, King of the Old Ones, appears in the gate. The King tries to free himself, but Matt finally realizes the smell of burning makes his power work because of how his mother burned the toast on the day she died. Matt's power awakens and he stops Sir Michael, by causing the handle of the sacrificial knife to melt in Sir Michael's hands. Even the King retreats, seeing Matt's power for the first time. Matt commands Richard to come with him and frees Richard. Jayne Deverill runs after them, and she fights Richard over a tank of acid but Richard knocks her in, to a horrifying demise.

The other villagers get scared and try to flee, but the power station is breaking up and they all burn in the flames. Sir Michael stands by the altar and he frees the King of the Old Ones with a single drop of Matt's blood. The King comes out onto Earth, and he grabs Sir Michael and kills him as his reward/punishment. But he is sucked back into his prison, when the radiation is sucked into his realm. The King is trapped again.

In the next few weeks, Richard is fired from the Gazette, having not showed up for several days, and appears to be unable to get another job; both he and Matt are frustrated when nothing of substance about their story appears in any news source. A society named the Nexus, to which Dravid belonged, contacts Richard, and tells Matt that another gate is opening in Peru. A man named Fabian, from the Nexus, appears and tells Richard and Matt that they need to be in Peru to stop another gate from opening.

Comparison with The Devil's Doorbell[]

The Power of Five series is based on another series of books written by Anthony Horowitz between 1983 and 1989, entitled Pentagram. The Pentagram series was meant to have five books, but only four were ever published. The first was called The Devil's Doorbell, on which Raven's Gate is based.

Awards[]

Raven's Gate won the Lancashire Children's Book of the Year award in 2006. This is Horowitz's second time winning this award after his first win in 1989 for his children's novel .^[1]

Adaptations[]

A graphic novel adaptation written for Walker Books by UK writer Tony Lee and drawn by artists Dom Reardon and Lee O'Connor was released on 3 August 2010. It was then re-issued with a new cover to coincide with then upcoming releases of the graphic novel adaptations for Evil Star and Nightrise on 6 June 2013.

In 2012, Horowitz tweeted that he had finished writing a 99 page screenplay of Raven's Gate, describing it as “a bit like Terminator but with demons”.^[2] However, Horowitz confirmed in 2021 that despite his wishes, there has been no further development as of yet on any possible film or TV adaptation of Raven’s Gate or of the Power of Five series as a whole.^[3]

References[]

External links[]

• The Power of Five official website
• The Power of Five official Scholastic website