The Nightmare Factory

There is a point in this book when one character says to another, ‘That was unreal, mate, you’re like Harry Potter or something’. And he’s clearly got it right. Here there is a world that exists beside our own, and a malevolent villain from this other dimension bent on the triumph of evil who can be stopped only by a young boy and his friends. However, this book has its own different premise: that our nightmares can be harvested and released back to destroy us. L.A. Jones builds on this to give us an adventure involving capture, imprisonment and escape, battles with monsters, and transforming potions and superpowers. Each chapter ends on a cliff-hanger which is, in the way of these things, often rather disappointingly resolved at the beginning of the next. But the pace doesn’t let up and if you want a page turner that borrows some ideas from those old Choose Your Own Adventure stories (surely there was a Mountain of Doom there too), you won’t be disappointed. To paraphrase the former Governor of California, ‘There will be sequels’.