Ravenous Things by Derrick Chow

Ravenous Things by Derrick Chow is a spectacularly spooky novel about a boy named Reggie Wong. There is only one thing missing in Reggie’s life, his dad, and Reggie would do just about anything to have him back. So when a creepy man called the Conductor promises Reggie that his greatest wish can be granted, Reggie hurriedly agrees. He follows the Conductor’s instructions and gathers at midnight in a subway station filled with many other kids who were promised the same wish. The kids rush onto the Conductor’s subway and are flung into rooms that look as if they were plucked straight out of the children’s lives. When Reggie gets off the subway he rushes into his father’s arms and they start working on a treehouse together, a project they did many years ago. However, whenever Reggie mentions his father’s death, his father seems to falter as if he’s a robot, and when Reggie finds out the truth about his father, it’s just a little too late.

Yet Reggie still doesn’t give up. He gets a clue of what to do from a swarm of blue beetles that he freed from a glass cage made to look like the sky. The clue instructs him to open a dirt block and having no other clues, he does. He opens a dirt door engraved with the words S.S. Enkrad and climbs down into the dark abyss below. 

As Reggie walks he feels as if something is groping at him, clawing and watching ready to pull him into nothingness and when he feels it rushing at him he pulls out his bear whistle, a gift from his father, and blows as hard as he can and suddenly he sees a giant glowing ball rushing towards him and realizes it was something he made with his father. A big balloon filled with glow sticks lights up his surroundings. With the balloon, Reggie keeps on walking in the opposite direction of his robot father and runs into Chantal, a girl he met at the subway station. Together, they keep forging a path through the darkness and find Gareth another kid who has escaped the robots and Reggie’s nemesis from school.

They make a plan to escape the Conductor and find themselves in a room full of their toys and clothes, however, when they hear an ominous flute tune they hide behind a giant pile of clothing and watch as the Conductor enters the room with a swarm of rats quickly following behind him. They continue watching in horror as the Conductor plays a different tune and the rats slowly transform into humanlike creatures that are meant to take the children’s places while the real kids are stuck underground in the labyrinth filled with darkness.

Reggie, Chantal, and Gareth quickly alter their plan, and instead of their goal being to get out of the tunnels, they now have to stop the Conductor’s evil plans and the rats who have taken their places as children, the rats that are absolutely ravenous.

This novel is a fantastic modern twist on the story of The Pied Piper that will have your heart pounding on every page and have your eyes glued to the words, and while those are both reasons why I loved this book so very much there is another that really made me like the book a lot better. Chow expertly drops hints as to who their real enemy is making you believe something on one page and then changing it on the next, leaving you questioning every little detail and action in the book.