BOOK REVIEW: Erebos by Ursula Poznanski

5:22 PM

Original title: Erebos

Author: Ursula Poznanski

Year of Publication: 2010

Number of pages: 522

Available in: German, English, Spanish

I read it in: Spanish

"Tell Nick Dunmore that he has to make sure that no non-initiate invades this territory, and afterwards he must go to the yard of his neighbours. The grid of the ventilation well is detached. If he takes it out and puts his hand in, he'll find something"

Erebos is a videogame that lands in Nick's hands with 3 simple rules: Don't talk about it or your character with anybody, always play alone and you only have one chance to play, use it well.

Nick has seen his classmates and friends distracted, tired and evasive, they won't talk about what's going on and plenty of them skip class. Until he sees a girl in his class reject a package from another kid and this way a Cd arrives in his hands: Erebos. He starts to play and for a while everything seem normal, until Erebos decides to reward him for his performance... on real life. This way he starts to get deeper into a world in which Erebos knows what he's doing and with whom he's doing it with, asks him to fulfill tasks in real life and keeps rewarding him the same way.

With this premise it's easy to understand why Nick's classmates were behaving the way they were, and it's also easy to understand why Nick lets himself get so deep into the game that he starts to lose sight of his priorities, and even more worrying, without realizing what exactly he's getting into. Lucky for him, there are people around him that have managed to stay away from the situation and start to have suspicions than something isn't ok.

Sincerely, it's a bit exasperating to read form Nick's point of view, given he doesn't take the best decisions. Even so, this teenage thriller is completely addictive. Even if it seems like such a bland topic, the way Erebos seems to know everything about each player and how it manages to manipulate them into doing whatever it wants is really creepy, even more when we see the effects it causes on those who lost their only chance to be in this world.

In the beginning, the only parts that bore me were the chapters of Nick in Erebos, before everything unfolded, because if there's anything that bores me more than seeing other people play videogames is to read about other people playing videogames, but when I realized that each one had clues to figure out who was behind it all, I read more carefully and patiently.

Definitely it's a fast book to read, given its addictive quality, and it's quite nice that it's a stand-alone book, because lately every single young adult book that gets published is a trilogy.