Terrifying Tale to Haunt Your Dreams

**Sponsored** The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim by Shane Peacock is haunting from the first page.  Set in the late 19th century, The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim trilogy is the story about a sensitive boy, Edgar Brim and his friends, Tiger Tilley and Jonathan and Lucy Lear who are charged with the immense task of ridding the world of the most scary and disgusting monsters ever dreamed: "the evil three".  Definitely geared to the teen/young adult and adult market, these books are dark and will leave your heart racing.

 Edgar Brim is a quiet boy who experiences nightly terrors and the hag who visits him in the night.  He also has the ability to enter a story, to become a character in a story.  He follows Count Dracula to the Carpathian Mountains and Frankenstein through the Arctic.  He enters these stories and can come up with clues and a plan to defeat them.  When a discovery by a teacher leads to a confession, Edgar is taken into the confidence of the unusual Crypto-Anthropology Society of the Queen's Empire which sets in motion the necessity to defeat these vile and maleficent beasts before they kill Edgar and his friends.  After reading book one you will be clamouring for book two.  It will be an agonizing wait to read the third and final instalment of Edgar's story.  Each book builds upon the next and of pattern holds the next beast will be the worst yet.    

Shane Peacock has done a masterful job of taking the reader back to the late 19th century, to the time when many of the great classic horror novels were written: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau.  He not only takes us back to the time period but also includes or alludes to many of the authors and famous people of the time period.  We meet Bram Stoker, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, H.G. Wells and even alluding to the terrorist Jack the Ripper.  Shane Peacock creates some amazing characters in Edgar but also his friend Tiger Tilley whose bravery and fierce loyalty to Edgar is an asset in their fight.  His treatment of Bram Stoker, Henry Irving and H.G. Wells, layer the story with complexity and adds the drama and the mystery. These are incredible books for any high school English class to use as jumping off points for research essays.  As I was reading I was taken back to the stacks at Carleton University, researching my own essays.  I wish I had something like Edgar's story to dive into.

Thanks so much to Tundra Books for providing a copy of the first two instalments of the trilogy in exchange for a fair and honest review.