Horror Book Review Darren Shan The Darren Shan Saga 10 The Lake Of Souls.

Tweet

Spoiler alerts. 2003. Harper-Collins. The final trilogy of The twelve volume Darren Shan Vampire stories begins with book ten. Heartbroken over the death of his creator, Mr Crepsley in the conclusion to book 9, Darren, the half-vampire goes back to the Cirque Du Freak where his adventures began. Harkat Mulls, his living-dead dwarf friend goes with him. The Circus people help Darren to mourn his creator properly. He then receives a number of visitors. Human allies from the battle against Steve Leonard (Darren’s arch enemy) have decided to raise an army of humans to fight him and his human allies. To this they need permission from the vampire princes in the secret Vampire Mountain. Darren plans to accompany them there, but the sinister Mr. Des Tiny who has a quest for Harkat sidetracks him. The dwarf was made from dead bodies, but now he has a chance to find the corpse of the man his soul belonged to when he was alive. It is a journey that will be extremely dangerous. Darren decides to give girlfriend Debbie a map to let her go to Vampire Mountain without him (a dangerous trip to be recounted in the later books), while he decides to go with Harkat on his extremely dangerous quest. Des Tiny sends them through a dimensional portal into what will turn out to be Earth’s not too distant future. They are instructed to kill a panther, which of course, they do, though it nearly kills them. The Panther has a map leading to their next quarry, a giant toad in an alligator infested swamp. The dead panther also has teeth with letters on. They are Harkat’s name. One tooth, which he removes, is also hollow. The toad protects a series of gelatine globular balls, which the heroes also liberate at some risk. A witch who has appeared in the books before now assists them. She is clearly an agent of Des Tiny’s. She puts them on a raft across a giant water lake and leaves them. They find an island but dragons attack them. A marooned pirate, called Spits who used to use a giant net to fish drowning people out of the sea, rescues them. Only in the end do our heroes find out that their drunken ally cooked the captured drownees and feed them to his crew. He is a cannibal. The heroes find the Sea Of Souls and learn that the gelatine balls, the panther’s hollow tooth, and a poison off a giant monster called The Grotesque to make bombs that ward off the dragons. Harkut uses the now dead Spits’s fishing net to liberate Harkat’s soul from the Lake Of Souls (a limbo for the dammed). The soul comes to life, and turns out to be that of Kurda Smahlt, a vampire traitor killed with assistance by Darren and Harkat. Mr Tiny himself now arrives to explain how he moved Harkat’s soul backwards and forwards in time to enable him to play a role in his own destiny. The two halves of the same soul are now invited to choose which can survive, as one must rot and perish. Smahlt, haunted by his betrayal, chooses death. Mr. Tiny sends Darren & Harkat home to the Circus, but they don’t actually see Smahlt die. Darren knows that he has only a short time to rest before he goes to find out the fate of Debbie which should be taken up in book eleven, Lord Of The Shadows. This book detracts from the Earth based manhunt for Steve, the evil Vampaneze leader responsible for many deaths, preferring a more generalized fantasy quest which is fun and important to later events but still leaves a sense of detour from the more exciting Earth based events. Arthur Chappell