Grip of the Shadow Plague

There is a scene early in Grip of the Shadow Plague where twelve-year-old Seth Sorenson trades a handful of batteries to two satyrs for a promise of gold. Forty pages later those satyrs are fighting each other in a shack, one of them halfway transformed into something with fangs, and the other is running. That is the Fablehaven method in miniature: hand the reader something small and funny, then change it while they are still holding it.

This is book three of five, and it is the one where the summer stops being an adventure and becomes an emergency. The other Fablehaven books were about discovery. This one is about what happens when the discovery is bad.

Two trails, one summer

The setup is quick. Kendra and Seth spend their summers at Fablehaven, a secret refuge for fairies, satyrs and other creatures, run by their grandparents Stan and Ruth Sorenson. Kendra, now fourteen, spent last summer becoming fairykind, which means she can see the hidden world, speak the languages of creatures, and eventually command fairies on the Queen's behalf. Seth, at twelve, has no such gift. He has a golem named Hugo, two satyr friends who want his batteries, and a persistent habit of going somewhere he was told not to go.

That habit produces the book's first warning. Seth slips into the Seven Kingdoms of the nipsies, half-inch-tall fairy folk who build miniature cities inside a hollowed-out hill, and finds that two kingdoms have turned warlike. Their citizens have grey skin, red eyes and fangs, and they claim allegiance to a new master nobody has heard of. Seth is supposed to keep quiet. He does not, which means he gets punished by his grandfather and also gets to be the person who warned everyone. That double result is very Seth.

Meanwhile Kendra is being recruited into the Knights of the Dawn, a masked brotherhood that fights the Society of the Evening Star, the enemy organisation trying to open the prison of the demon Zzyzx. Their masked Captain summons her to a gathering, and she is inducted alongside Gavin Rose, a teenager whose dragon expert father was killed by a dragon. Their Lieutenant Dougan Fisk sends her to a secret preserve on Navajo land in Arizona called Lost Mesa, to help recover one of five artifacts that could open Zzyzx. Warren Burgess, the family's adventurer, privately tells her he plans to steal the artifact from Dougan afterward so that no one person controls more than one of them. Kendra agrees. Both siblings are now off on dangerous errands in opposite directions, which is the structural choice the whole book rests on.

The distrust running underneath it is about the Sphinx. Everyone treats the Sphinx as a friend and a source of good advice, and a prisoner named Vanessa Santoro, a narcoblix held in the dungeon in a device called the Quiet Box, claims the Sphinx is secretly leading the Society. Nobody can confirm it. Dougan, the Captain, and the Sphinx are in the same organisation, and one of them is the traitor. The book knows this. The readers know this. The characters spend two hundred pages being suspicious of each other anyway.

How the shadow plague works

The plague is not a virus in the ordinary sense. Beings of light who get infected do not turn evil, which is the disturbing part, because evil at least has an address. They turn into shadows. The rules of the preserve still apply to them, so darkened creatures can walk into protected places that fallen fairies cannot, and they spread the condition by contact.

Coulter Dixon, the family's expert on magical relics, touches a darkened fairy and vanishes. The satyr Newel, bitten during a confrontation, turns savage and bites Tanu, and the shadow climbs Tanu's arm. By the time Seth works out what is happening, his grandparents, Grandma, Warren, Dale, Tanu and Coulter have all been turned into shadows, and nobody else in the preserve can see them.

Which brings us to the part of the book I like most, and it has nothing to do with the plot. Seth alone can see the shadow people. He can also hear the prisoners in the dungeon under the house, and speak the languages of imps, goblins, trolls, demons and giants. All of it comes from the revenant he destroyed the summer before, and the dark nail he pulled out of it, which left him immune to magical fear. So when the family flees to the pond around the Fairy Queen's shrine and Seth is the only person who can talk to his own grandfather, the scene has a strange intimacy to it. Grandpa Sorenson is still Grandpa. He is just made of shadow now, and he is explaining the rules of the situation to a boy who can see him and cannot touch him.

Painted Mesa

The Arizona chapters are the other half of the book and they are the better half. Kendra's group has to climb Painted Mesa, a plateau holding the vault where the artifact should be, and the climb is the problem. A violent rainstorm breaks over the mesa, and Kendra's fairykind sight picks out the Flooded Stairs, a legendary route that has been invisible for centuries. At the top, kachinas attack, the half-human spirits of the mesa. Neil, the Navajo guide, turns out to be a skinwalker and becomes a stallion to carry Kendra out of trouble, and he dies touching one of the floating chokepods, bulbs that release lethal gas.

Inside the vault they meet a young copper dragon, which Gavin calms with nothing but eye contact, and then they find the innermost chamber empty. The artifact is not there. Instead there is an inscription in a fairy language that Kendra can read, and it says that Patton Burgess, the caretaker who ran Fablehaven generations ago, moved the artifact back to the preserve years before any of them were born.

So the two trails cross. Kendra comes home with no artifact, a dragon tamer's attention, and the news that the thing they were sent to fetch has been sitting at Fablehaven all along.

The nail in the cursed tree

Seth gets the other half of the answer by breaking a rule again. He goes down to the lair of Graulas, one of the most powerful demons on the preserve, while his grandfather stands frozen with terror outside, since Seth is the only person the demon's aura does not stop. Graulas is surprisingly forthcoming. The prisoner released from the Quiet Box was Navarog, the demon prince and lord of dragons. Once free, Navarog went looking for the dark nail that Seth had pulled from the revenant and carried it to Kurisock, a demon of shadow bound to a tar pit somewhere on the preserve. The nail was amplifying Kurisock, and the amplification is the plague.

Then Patton Burgess explains the rest, and it is the best idea in the book. Ephira, the spectral woman haunting the old manor, was once a hamadryad, a tree nymph who married Patton's uncle Marshal Burgess and gave up her immortality to be with him. When Marshal betrayed her, she cut down her own bonded tree and carried its last seed to Kurisock, and the demon bound himself to the seed and through it to her. The nail is now embedded in that cursed tree, and every bit of Kurisock's power flows through Ephira and out into the preserve. The plague is not an accident. It is a heartbreak that turned into a disease.

Patton Burgess and the Chronometer

Seth gets to the answer with his hands. The corrupted brownies seize the house, rig it with traps and steal the register that controls the boundaries of the preserve. The family runs to the pond. Kendra persuades Lena, a naiad who chose mortality once to marry Patton, to reveal where Patton hid the artifact: a safe in the old manor that appears every Monday at noon for one minute.

When they go to the manor, Ephira's presence turns everyone into shadows except Seth, who walks on to the safe and finds the Chronometer, a golden sphere with power over time. Pressing its buttons brings Patton Burgess himself forward out of his own era, three days of borrowed time. Patton immediately has to deal with a debt of honour that Seth incurred by insulting Broadhoof the centaur, so he fights Broadhoof in a duel, wins, and settles it. Lena climbs out of the pond to be with him, choosing mortality again for three days, and brings a silver bowl from the Fairy Queen's shrine.

The Fairy Queen's pebble

The cure has a price and the price is written down plainly, which is to Mull's credit. Kendra crosses to the island of the Fairy Queen's shrine and the Queen confirms that she is a handmaiden with the authority to command fairies. The Queen then forges a talisman, an egg-shaped white pebble, by concentrating the shrine's protective energy into a single object, which destroys the shrine in the process. If the pebble touches the nail, both objects are destroyed, and whoever brings them together dies.

Everyone argues about the arithmetic. Kendra restores Coulter just by touching him, which tells her the pebble's power is also a kind of medicine. They gather the light creatures that are left and go to Kurisock's tar pit, where Ephira's dark fabric tendrils keep turning allies into shadows and the centaur Broadhoof is killed, caught between the talisman's light and Ephira's darkness. Patton tries to throw the pebble and the two objects refuse each other. Ephira makes him invisible. Lena catches Kendra's throw, forces her way to the cursed tree and presses the pebble against the nail herself.

Both objects are destroyed. Ephira crumbles to dust, Kurisock dissolves, and the plague reverses across the whole preserve. Lena is dead at the foot of the shattered tree. Patton decides to go back to his own century and spend whatever life he has left loving her properly, and refuses to tell her what is coming.

Afterwards the Codex of the Knights confirms that the Sphinx was the traitor all along and the Captain of the Knights besides. He escapes during the confrontation using a teleportation rod Kendra had unknowingly recharged. Lost Mesa has fallen in the meantime, with its dragon loose and its museum skeletons walking. Before Patton leaves, he tells Kendra that the Journal of Secrets contains hidden messages written in umite wax that only her fairykind eyes can read, and that information on two more artifacts waits in a chamber beneath the Fablehaven dungeon. Kendra goes home carrying the Chronometer, a rain staff from Lost Mesa, and a letter from Gavin that ends with him signing himself her admirer.

What it is worth

The flaws are real and they are structural. The two-ploth design gives each half about half the book, so the Arizona expedition and the Fablehaven siege both hurry. Seth's rule breaking is the same engine that powered the first book, and by book three it is more habit than conflict, and the resolution of his one big transgression costs him nothing. The lore density is heavy: nipsies, revenants, tar pits, Zzyzx, umite wax, Kachinas and skinwalkers arrive faster than a twelve-year-old reader can hold them, and several chapters spend as much time explaining the taxonomy of the preserve as they do moving the story.

Lena's death is the other problem. It is set up so tidily that it reads as a required payment rather than a loss. The book tells you she is mortal for three days, tells you she loves Patton, and then needs her to die so the pebble can meet the nail. It works as a mechanism and it fails as a gut punch, and after she dies Patton's decision to go back to his own century and love her the rest of his life is a slightly embarrassed way of filing the grief away before the next volume.

What the book does better than the first two is threat with a cause. The evil here is not a wandering demon or a traitor in a mask. It is a woman who loved someone, was betrayed, and made a bargain that turned her own tree into a weapon, and the whole preserve is still catching fire from it. Seth's discovery that he can see people the rest of the family has lost, and speak to his grandfather through the gloom, is the most durable thing in the volume. Read it for that, for the Painted Mesa climb, and for a fair amount of scepticism about how tidily the magic solves everything.