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Summary
Summary
Having escaped from Hong Kong, the five gatekeepers - Matt, Pedro, Scott, Jamie and Scarlett - are scattered in a hostile and dangerous world. As they struggle to re-group and plan their next move, the malevolent King of the Old Ones gathers his forces in Oblivion: a desolate landscape where the last survivors of humanity must fight the ultimate battle.
Author Notes
Author and television scriptwriter Anthony Horowitz was born in Stanmore, England on April 5, 1956. At the age of eight, he was sent to a boarding school in London. He graduated from the University of York and published his first book, Enter Frederick K. Bower (1979), when he was 23. He writes mostly children's books, including the Alex Rider series, The Power of Five series, and the Diamond Brothers series.
The Alex Rider series is about a 14-year-old boy becoming a spy and was made into a movie entitled Stormbreaker. He has won numerous awards including the 1989 Lancashire Children's Book of the Year Award for Groosham Grange and the 2003 Red House Children's Book Award for Skeleton Key. He also writes novels for adults including The Killing Joke and The Magpie Murders. He has created Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders for television as well as written episodes for Poirot and Murder Most Horrid. He made The New York Times Best Seller list with his titles The House of Silk Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin and Moriarity.Most recently he was commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write the James Bond novel Trigger Mortis. Anthony was awarded an OBE for his services to literature in January 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-The final book (2013) in Horowitz's seriHes finds the fate of the world in the hands of five teenagers: Matt, Pedro, Scott, Jamie, and Scarlet. They are the Gatekeepers. At the end of Necropolis (2009, both Scholastic), after entering a special door, the teens are flung to different parts of the world. They emerge into a dangerous and horrific world 10 years in the future that is beset by evil, torture, murder, death, plagues, famine, and other catastrophes, and on the verge of destruction orchestrated by the evil Old Ones headed by Chaos. To defeat the Old Ones, the five Gatekeepers must be together for the final battle. Much of the story revolves around each Gatekeeper's struggle to overcome obstacles and challenges to make their way to Oblivion, a frozen, desolate area of Antarctica where Chaos and the Old Ones are waiting. Horowitz's story is fast-moving, intense, and unflinchingly graphic. Listeners new to the series will be able to follow this volume because past details are included. However, to fully grasp this tale's scope and complexity, listeners should be familiar with the first four titles. Simon Prebbles's reading masterfully conveys the terror of this dangerous dystopian world. His consistent portrayal of multiple characters and accents is excellent. This intense, suspense-filled conclusion will keep listeners riveted right up to the end.-Mary Olounye, Shaker Heights Public Library, OH (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
After being sent forward in time and scattered across the globe, the five Gatekeepers must reunite in Antarctica to prevent the Old Ones from destroying the world. Perspective-switching third-person narration and clumsy exposition turn what should be a fast-paced adventure into a predictable, overly long book, but fans of the series will enjoy this fifth installment in the Five's adventures. (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
"I've got a big story to tell," says the narrator in the first chapter of Oblivion. "The end of the world . . . and stories don't get any bigger than that." The fifth and final book in Anthony Horowitz's Power of Five series is indeed epic: the most ambitious he's yet written. Grander and bleaker than the Alex Ryder novels with which he made his name, it's about the Five: a group of supernaturally gifted teenagers who must save the world from ancient forces of evil known as the Old Ones. It opens with the Five scattered across the planet and hurled 10 years forwards in time, into a world dominated by the Old Ones and the humans who serve them. They must somehow make their way back to each other, for only together can they prevail. The story is simple: each one must overcome obstacles, travelling through a world of appalling devastation in which almost every contemporary anxiety has comes to pass. The scale of the apocalypse is memorably conveyed with a wonderful sleight of hand: a description of a filthy city of starving beggars that seems to be some third world crisis zone, but turns out to be New York. Horowitz describes famine in the US, plague in China, terrorist bombs in Britain. All infrastructure has been destroyed. We get some chilling glimpses of the aftermath: corpses rotting in a tube train; a prim Home Counties village where cannibalism has taken over. Perhaps most powerful of all is a sequence of Mount Vesuvius erupting, which brings to mind the paintings of John Martin. Behind all this lies a sense of moral outrage at a world that allowed climate change, rainforest destruction, massive inequalities. There's a fierce political urgency here, touching on everything from the Arab spring to the eurozone crisis, giving the book a topical, timely feel. Of course, Horowitz is hardly alone in this. Dystopian fiction has dominated young adult publishing since The Hunger Games, and he seems to acknowledge this by making one of his characters handy with a bow and arrow. As in most such fiction, the only hope comes from youth. Oblivion's teenage protagonists are repeatedly patronised and underestimated, yet they alone can save the Earth from the Old Ones and humanity from itself. This is an empowering message, and it's underpinned by an ethical system that opposes selfishness with self-sacrifice. Yet the book's moral and political ambitions are undercut by Horowitz's tendency to depict his human villains as grotesques, often characterising them by physical imperfections, heavily accented English, or effeminacy. In the Alex Ryder stories, this strategy followed the classic Bond villain formula, but in Oblivion, it feels tonally wrong. Descriptions such as "weedy", "girlish" and "piggy eyes" are jarringly out of place in a book of such gravity. It is also unfortunate that while Horowitz is careful to show a mix of good and bad characters in most parts of the world, the Arab characters seem to be either self-serving or treacherous at best. It's a shame that Horowitz allows such flaws to undermine his book's moral complexity, and its otherwise well-crafted consistency. For all its length, Oblivion maintains a propulsive momentum, powered by his trademark storytelling virtues: relentlessly piling on action, building suspense, teasing the reader with tantalising cliffhangers. Whether he fully achieves his deeper ambitions or not, it's exciting to see so big and bold a book being written for a young audience, who will find much here to think about, and much to enjoy. SF Said's The Outlaw Varjak Paw is published by David Fickling Books. To order Oblivion for pounds 13.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - SF Said This is an empowering message, and it's underpinned by an ethical system that opposes selfishness with self-sacrifice. Yet the book's moral and political ambitions are undercut by [Anthony Horowitz]'s tendency to depict his human villains as grotesques, often characterising them by physical imperfections, heavily accented English, or effeminacy. In the Alex Ryder stories, this strategy followed the classic Bond villain formula, but in Oblivion, it feels tonally wrong. Descriptions such as "weedy", "girlish" and "piggy eyes" are jarringly out of place in a book of such gravity. It is also unfortunate that while Horowitz is careful to show a mix of good and bad characters in most parts of the world, the Arab characters seem to be either self-serving or treacherous at best. - SF Said.
