One of the delightful things about J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter books is how well they merge magic with the everyday world. This same enchantment of the ordinary can be found in The Saint’s Bones, the first book of a series revolving around a group of teenagers with special powers known as “the Gang”. Jerry Flannigan is lightning fast—so quick you can’t see him moving. Leonard Reasoner is an intellectual genius. Noah Apple hears people’s thoughts. Isaac Little is strong enough to lift a truck, and Nelke Van Haelen can heal people by touching them. In short, we have some kids who just need to don a few capes and move to Gotham City to enter the pages of a comic book. But The Saint’s Bones is a young adult novel, not a cartoon, and so the members of gang live fairly normal lives, attending St. Adalbert’s High School and minding their manners in front of the nuns. The school seems to attract students with exceptional talents, and Sister Providence, principal at St. Adalbert’s, takes on the dubious honor of teaching the Gang how to use theirs.

Mayhem, of course, is not far off. Trouble is brewing in the nearby MinO’ too, a sort of wildlife refuge gone mad, with creatures so bizarre they make Dr. Moreau’s island look like a petting zoo. Among them are freaked out zombies, who have made their repulsive way into the darker hallways at St.Adalbert’s:

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see...AARGH!” Noah screamed as he saw what was facing him... It was shaped like a man, but it wasn’t human. It was ashen gray from top to bottom, with wisps of wild, wiry, gray hair protruding from the top of its head and its face. Its nose and lips were rotted and black and filled with holes. Its left hand had only a thumb and a ring finger. Festering cavities sat in place of its missing digits. The creature’s shredded clothes covered only portions of its body, and where the clothes had holes, so, sickeningly, did its skin—small and large openings surrounded by withered, flapping gray skin, through which poured maggots, roaches and worms. It was a walking corpse, a study in decay.

The gathering evil is commanded by a certain General Beel, chief servant to the shadowy Emperor. Beel’s plans seem to involve locating the miraculous bones of a local saint, father Pierre, and ultimately (what else?) taking over the world. But first he must get past the Gang, who have become quite fond of making unauthorized ventures into MinO’too.

I mentioned Harry Potter above, but this book really has more in common with the Hardy Boys or Jupiter Jones and his Three Investigators, with plenty of adventure and school-boy camaraderie. It is Catholic in tone—the supernatural is attributed to the miraculous rather than the magical, and I have a suspicion the Emperor will turn out to have a rather hot address—but not overly religious. The writing is sometimes clunky and the narrative is missing a few gears, but this is made up for by imaginative storytelling that tosses the reader winged monsters and hermits in the same chapter as varsity football and AP Calculus. In addition to being the first book in the Gang series, The Saint’s Bones is also the debut novel for the author and Michigan-based New Classics Press. We hope to see more of both them and the Gang.

- Joel Van Valin