| Blood Beast | |
|---|---|
| |
| Author | Darren Shan |
| Series | The Demonata |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
| Previous Book | "Bec" |
| Succeeding Book | "Demon Apocalypse" |
Blood Beast is the fifth book in Darren Shan's The Demonata series and was released 4th June 2007. It is narrated by Grubbs Grady, the narrator of Lord Loss and Slawter. The plot is part of a two part story, along with book six. Though the previous four books have not been in chronological order, this book is the furthest book into the future. It mainly deals with whether or not Grubbs Grady will be struck with lycanthropy and how he will deal with this problem.
The title was originally announced at the Edinburgh Book Festival, and Darren Shan read a small sequence about a demon attack on a plane, which featured Lord Loss.
Summary[]
Grubbs is having nightmares, extreme nightmares, extreme daily nightmares about demons and worse, about becoming a werewolf himself. He now has made a group of friends: Loch, Charlie, Frank, Leon and Mary. With Mary also come her female friends Reni, Loch’s sister, who Grubbs fancies and others like Shannon and Nina. With these new friends Bill-E has fallen to the waist side. The second thing Grubbs is worried about is his increasing magical abilities. Dervish has to leave for a few days and hints at the opportunity for a party. Grubbs and his friends plan the party but only after Reni’s help do things come together, off course Bill-E who gets bullied by Grubbs new best friend Loch, is also invited. During the party, Grubbs gets sick and realizes he might be turning into a werewolf. After midnight only Grubbs friends and Bill-E remain and they play spin the bottle, yet things go wrong as Grubbs get to kiss Reni and the bottle spins around in the air, then explodes and luckily is turned into flower petals and butterflies by Grubbs before the shards can do real damage. Later that night he really turns and uses his magic to fight it. When he wakes up, his friends have done most of the cleaning and the girls have left, the rest leave when the cleaning is done, leaving Grubbs behind with only Loch and Bill-E. As Grubbs is getting sicker and Loch is getting bored an argument arises and Grubbs tells Loch about Lord Sheftree’s buried treasure and they go looking for it after digging around they decide to stop but make one more hole and the discover a cave like tunnel with huge rocks blocking it. They start to excavate it but as it gets dark they stop and agree to work on it whenever they can, yet as night falls Grubbs changes again. As he regains his senses, he finds himself in the hole, having increased it four fold. He then sees a flicker in the rock as a girl’s face appears to him. This freaks him out, he wants to tell Dervish, but he is still suffering from his binge drinking. At school Loch and Bill-E want to continue searching for the treasure, he tries to dissuade them to no avail. They go to the hole while Grubbs stays in doors, but since Dervish has left he joins them at the hole and pretends he doesn’t know why it got so big. The theorize on it and Bill-E states it must have been some kind of trap, which was delayed due to age. They continue digging the hole but grow increasingly hostile to each other and Grubbs realizes demonic magic is at work but he tells the others that chemicals are making them act strangely. As they continue Bill-E’s leg falls inside a lower hole and after pulling him out, they realize they have been excavating a long cave tunnel. Bill-E gets some lights and they start descending the cave after quite some time they reach the main cave, the search it several times for treasure but find nothing. Loch then says they need to look above the waterfall and he and Bill-E go to do so. Meanwhile Grubbs is struggling with the wolf inside of him and sees the face again, then a scream followed by a thud forces everything else from his mind. Loch has fallen and is dying, Bill-E runs to get Dervish, as Grubbs waits Loch dies and he screams in anguish cracking the cave wall. Grubbs then notices that all of Loch’s blood on the cave and his coat has strangely disappeared.
Dervish and Bill-E arrive and Dervish tells them to lie and pretend that they were climbing in an abandoned quarry and that Loch fell there. They stage another fall and have the authorities come to the quarry, to cover up the real situation. Dervish then explains to Grubbs why they had to lie, stating that sometimes the Demonata try to cross more permanently and that 1500 years ago they used this cave to do so and he has been assigned to life here to guard over it. He also explains that there were spells in place that should have warned him about people messing with the tunnel, they needed to keep the cave secret in order to protect it and thereby the world. He will now reach out to the leader of the Disciples who is a magician who can check whether a doorway has been opened. Grubbs then finally opens up to Dervish about what has been going on from him hiding his magic, to his nightmares and the fact he might have been using his magic to suppress the werewolf change. This troubles Dervish extremely, Grubbs goes to bed and realizes he didn’t mention the disappearing blood to Dervish. Grubbs then suddenly wakes to find Dervish on the phone talking to somebody about him, while holding a black folder which he immediately knows belongs to the Lambs. The branch of his family, that is tasked to study dispatch off werewolf children. The next week goes by in a haze as does Loch’s funeral. Then the following week, he finds out his school counselor is sick and now there is a new one. This turns out to be Juni Swan, whom he met on the set of Slawter. She asks him to not tell Dervish yet of her presence and she explains how she came to be there. The following weeks she helps him, Bill-E and the other children deal with Loch’s death, and somehow Grubbs is jealous of how much time she is spending with Bill-E. Then one day she shows up at their home and rekindles her friendship with Dervish which quickly turns into to more, eventually Dervish gives her a quick tour of the house and she reveals, after apparently having everything else in common with Dervish that she is a pretty decent mage, as she undoes the spells on his study. Yet this somehow makes Grubb feel unease. The next week Juni according to Grubbs sees more of his uncle then he has seen in three months. Bill-E however thinks the match is great, Reni comes back to school and Shannon plans for all of them to go to a movie, including Bill-E. Juni and Dervish are practicing magic all the time, then when he prepares to go to the cinema, they are practicing again and Juni sees him leaving them a note through her eyelids, this disturbs Grubbs and as he is about to kiss with Reni during the movie he stops distracted by this. Then outside the theatre he meets a tramp that Bill-E earlier gave some money to. At the house Juni tells, she saw him and Grubbs explains she reminded him of Artery. They then agree on their common hatred of the Demonate and Juni tells him that Dervish will ask her to move in soon. He tells her, he is fine with it and when Dervish does so, she agrees to a trial period. As Juni moves in, Grubbs is worried about his magic, lycanthrophy, Juni moving in, Loch, Reni and the tramp he still didn’t tell Dervish about. He starts jogging and ends up at the cave which has been partially covered up. The tramp interrupts his thoughts and tells him the cave is a grave fit for a king and while ignoring all his questions tells him while looking at the moon that it won’t be long now. He races home to tell Dervish about the strange man, but as he comes to the house, he realizes Dervish might already know about him and that the tramp might be one of the lambs, send to keep an eye on him. This alongside the fact that Dervish quickly contacted the Lambs, upsets Grubbs a lot. He dreads the upcoming moon, while telling Reni he is worried about the future and keeping an eye out for the tramp who is following him. Then Dervish tells him to meet with him and reveals that he told Juni all about the lycanthrophy. They have an angry back and forth about it. Yet Grubbs relents and starts talking with Juni in her professional capacity, they also go into magic and he allows her to probe him. Afterwards after she tells him, she can’t find magic inside of him, he reveals that he knows that Dervish called the Lambs and explains what they are. The day before the full moon he gets sick at school and at night Juni and Dervish encourage him to fight the beast and with tremendous difficulty he taps into his magic and defeats the beast. As the sun rises he finds that all three of them got injured, he tells them of his fear of losing to the beast, but they tell him to rest. After waking up they lounge about and Juni vows to protect him no matter what. In the evening, he tells them to lock him in the cage, in the cellar. They do so and help him struggle, Juni then tells Dervish she knows an adrenaline like spell and tells him to fetch some things, which he does. She then reveals that Lambs are here and lets him out of the cage and tells him to go to the cave. Outside he fights the lambs and makes it to the cave, where he again sees the face and cracks the wall with a scream. Then as Juni arrives the beast takes over. He regains consciousness, for a second he is relieved until he sees, he is in a house with some mauled bodies. He finds out they are Ma and Pa Spleen, Bill-E’s grandparents. Bill-E himself is hurt but still alive. Juni tells him, the beast took over, she used magic to safe herself, then found him in the Spleen household. They have a back and forth about what to do next and Juni convinces him to run away with her. They go to an airport where they use magic to blend it and get a couple of plane tickets. On the plane he has more wolf dreams but he is awakened by turbulence. Then as the turbulence increase the cockpit door is blown of it hinges and Grubbs thinks he sees unnatural smoke coming from it. Then he sees they are strands of webs and then Artery and several other demons come spilling out of the cockpit and start killing, eating and injuring people. Then Lord Loss arrives and tells the people that their suffering will be short, but painful. Juni then appears behind him and Grubbs tries to warn her and she reveals that she summoned him here. She then kisses a strange men and sucks the life out of him, revealing her demonic nature to Grubbs. She then hugs and pecks Lord Loss’s cheek and says: He’s all yours now – master.
Notes[]
- On page 255 in place of the normal Chapter Heading, "Fly Me To The Moon", the font is somewhat mirrored. Behind this is the name of the first chapter of the book "Damn the Sandman". Many fans thought that there was a significance to this, but the author confirmed that it was only a typo.
- The face Grubbs is the rock was Bec, a distant cousin of Grubbs. They are presumably in the cave where she died 1500 years before. This is the first time in the series that a narrator has appeared in a book that they have not narrated.
- Loch was accidentally murdered by Bill-E in a instance where Bill-E 'whipped his hand away'. This means that Bill-E performed the sacrifice.
| << The Saga of Darren Shan | The Demonata (Narrator in Parentheses) | |||||||
| #01 | "Lord Loss" | (Grubbs) | #05 | "Blood Beast" | (Grubbs) | #09 | "Dark Calling" | (Kernel) |
| #02 | "Demon Thief" | (Kernel) | #06 | "Demon Apocalypse" | (Grubbs) | #10 | "Hell's Heroes" | (Grubbs) |
| #03 | "Slawter" | (Grubbs) | #07 | "Death's Shadow" | (Bec) | #Bonus | "Shanta Clause" | (Shanta) |
| #04 | "Bec" | (Bec) | #08 | "Wolf Island" | (Grubbs) | |||