New World is the apt name of a planet on which Ben and Max grow up as brothers. There was some adoption in the mix due to a planetary civil war, but they don’t let that worry them. PIPER AT THE GATES OF DUSK is a heart-pounding blend of myth and horror, placed carefully on another planet so it couldn’t happen here.

For the first part, I was reminded of the Native American myth of the Wendigo, a looming, terrifying being of destruction. Then I saw the Celtic Fae fantasies, in which the young human people are stolen or killed. This merged with the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a German folk story in which, again, the children are stolen. You can get the picture. Fishing and farming, as the boys think their lives will be, are a short-lived beginning.

I may be the only reader of YA SFF (science fiction and fantasy) who hasn’t yet read THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO, though I know of it. Author Patrick Ness completed a trilogy around that book and now takes up events on the same planet twenty years later, so if, like me, you are late to the feast, you can still catch up with the story. Some of the characters are the same and refer occasionally to past events. New World was already home to beings that communicated by mental pictures, which emanated visibly from them. Humans found this hard to cope with, especially when some humans started acting the same way. The telepathy is called Noise. The indigenous people, the Land, resent human interference, and it seems like they were right. An uneasy peace has fallen, and then the Wendigos – sorry, the kids just call them gods – arrive.

I read science fiction; I don’t read horror. Once this went down the horror trail, I did lose a lot of interest, I’m afraid. But by then, I was invested enough to continue. I warn that young readers may well have horrible images in their heads, and I suggest to adults that if you would not let your kids watch this on TV, you probably should put it away for another year. The boys Ben and Max are around fifteen, one of them has a speaking disability, and the other one has the almost obligatory gender issue of today’s teen fiction. This really just helps us to keep the characters separate. There are some girls, like Tara; however, this is a tale about trying to do what is right and brave. We get a cliffhanger ending because Patrick Ness wants us to buy the New World Trilogy. I don’t like cliffhangers either. Make up your own mind. PIPER AT THE GATES OF DUSK is almost a quote from WIND IN THE WILLOWS, but the last word should be dawn – PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN is a title already taken by a wonderful horse fantasy.