BOOK REVIEW: THE DEVOURING GRaY BY CHRISTINE LYNN HERMAN

​They say all roads lead to Rome. However, Four Paths lead to betrayal, small-town feuds and monster from beyond the veil that is gaining power with each passing day.  

Violet has just lost her sister, and her mother has decided that it is time to return to her ancestral hometown of Four Paths, a town that is as trapped in its ties to the past, as it is to the monster that is imprisoned within the  prison created by four of the town's founding families.  A prison that exists out of time and place and yet overlays itself upon the town.  

As is want to happen in books such as this the barriers between the prison dimension and our world are beginning to thin allowing the monster to cross over to our dimensional and brutally kill the residents of Four Paths.  It's up to children of the founding families to put a stop to the monster once and for all.  

Now, this may all seem like your typical horror thriller aimed more at the YA end of the horror spectrum, and while it does contain numerous tropes and character types that can be found in a thousand other novels, The Devouring Grey has  a strong enough identity of its own to stand out from the other books jostling for attention on this shelf of the genre spectrum.

A lot of comparisons will be made to things such as Buffy, and maybe even Riverdale, but  this is a little bit unfair, yes they focus of the story is on the band of plucky teenagers and their fight against evil and the fights between themselves as they struggle to keep their family name and history intact.  However, Herman's novel has more in common with the works of Ray Bradbury than the more obvious comparisons.  Herman's prose has that almost poetic turn of phrase that the backbone of Bradbury's prose, it also shares that sense of mounting dread, and something not being quite right that was evident in some of Bradbury's best work.  There is a thin veneer to life in Four Paths, and Herman takes excellent care to peel this veneer away in a controlled and chilling way to reveal the hidden truth beneath the picturesque and pastoral facade of Four Paths.  

Herman has also plotted out the narrative arc with the finesse of a master storyteller, the balance between the interpersonal relationships of the teenagers and the necessity to drive the story forward with plot reveals and action is handled almost perfectly, with each "scene cut" merging perfectly together.  However, this is also where the only gripe with the book comes in.  

While the characters are carefully crafted to have individually strong personalities, and fully rounded motives and desires, they do tend to at the beginning merge into one another.  It may have been helpful to introduce them slightly slower and allowing them to individually breathe on the page for a short while allowing their identities for cement in the reader's mind.  

The handling of the four main protagonists is handled sympathetically, for example,  two of the characters are bisexual, but the inclusion of this in the story feels natural, and never feels as though it is a box-ticking exercise. And this has to be applauded, diversity representation in YA fiction is significant, but if handled poorly will cause more damage than good, and Herman's depiction of them is exemplary.

The Devouring Gray is a profoundly atmospheric story, the mist-shrouded world of Four Paths, and lives of its inhabitants lives and breaths on the page thanks to a deft descriptive style and a natural sense of dialogue between the characters.  With strong themes of identity, sins of the past, and deciding between carving your own path in the world and the keeping the ties that bind to your past, The Devouring Gray is a strong and emotive journey through the dark heart of small-town rural America.  They say you can't escape your past, but sometimes your history contrives to trap there.  

the devouring gray 

For fans of Stranger Things, Riverdale and The Raven Cycle. 
Can a group of teenagers hold back the otherworldly horror that stalks the woods?
On the edge of town, a beast haunts the woods, trapped in the Gray, its bonds loosening…
Uprooted from the city, Violet Saunders doesn’t have much hope of fitting in at her new school in Four Paths, a town almost buried in the woodlands of rural New York. The fact that she’s descended from one of the town’s founders doesn’t help much, either—her new neighbours treat her with distant respect, and something very like fear. When she meets Justin, May, Isaac, and Harper, all children of founder families, and sees the otherworldly destruction they can wreak, she starts to wonder if the townsfolk are right to be afraid.
When bodies start to appear in the woods, the locals become downright hostile. Can the teenagers solve the mystery of Four Paths, and their own part in it, before another calamity strikes?

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