The Spook's Secret

The Spook's Secret is the third book in Joseph DeLaney's excellent and horrifying series, The Wardstone Chronicles. Like the previous two books, The Spook's Curse and The Spook's Apprentice, The Spook's Secret lays the atmosphere on thick and wastes no time in launching straight into the action. It also continues to draw on various facets of British folklore, obscure and otherwise, to great effect.

Continuing on not too far from where the last book ended, this volume begins with the Spook and his apprentice Tom Ward heading off to the Spook's other house in Anglezarke for the winter. Anglezarke is a cold, harsh and oppressively miserable place... the people aren't too friendly (especially not to Spooks) and the place is overrun with all sorts of misbegotten forces of the dark. Upon arrival Tom surprisingly discovers that this other house is inhabited by a woman, a domesticated Lamia-witch named Meg (who was alluded to in the previous book). Is this the secret of the title? Hardly.

DeLaney uses the book's title to throw all sorts of new revelations at us, as well as one or two red herrings. A lot of the Spook's past is made clear to us, and Tom's apprenticeship continues along it's dangerous and harrowing path. Further developments also take place with Tom's family, setting up some big changes for the following book in the series, The Spook's Battle. There's not much I can say about this entry in the series without spoiling it, so I'll speak a little more about the plot's set-up.

This book isn't as linear and straightforward as the previous books in the series . It takes place over a longer amount of time and is more episodic, running several subplots along with its main plot. The main plot concerns itself with Morgan, a mysterious one-time apprentice of the Spook who has turned to necromancy (a magic concerned with the dead). Morgan is obsessed with Golgoth - the sleeping and destructive Old God of Winter - and will stop at nothing to see this all-powerful evil rise again. The horror element isn't as full-on as the previous two books, though there are one of two moments of shocking abject terror, and the images conjured up by both DeLaney's succinct writing and the illustrator's shadowy line-drawings do little to counter this.

I enjoyed this book a lot. I knocked it over in little more than a day, and it really made me pine for the next installment - for which I'll had to wait a good five months! My only sticking point (and this is with the overall series) is with the little blurb about the 'Wardstone' at each book's beginning... so far (at the time of writing there are seven books in the series) there have been very few clues as to why the series is called The Wardstone Chronicles. I've read conflicting reports at one or two different websites over the years in regards to how long this series will run... one site said that there will be at least six books, whilst another stated that book 4 would be the last. I'm guessing it won't be ending anytime soon as they haven't even started talking about this mysterious Wardstone yet. And I want more, lots more, adventures with Tom and the Spook. The Spook's such a great character too... it's an askew and slightly subversive take on a fantasy archetype (the grouchy, hardened but likeable old wise man - EG. Gandalf, Dumbledore, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, The First Doctor in Doctor Who, etc, etc) and I want to hear more and more about him in plenty more tales of binding Boggarts and witches into pits of salt and iron, and all the other bizarre and obscure ways he takes on the forces of the Dark.

This really is an excellent series. Highly reccomended.