Suspense In Chris Wooding's Malice Essay

Luke, the main character in Chris Wooding’s horror novel Malice, lives in modern-day London where he tries a ritual in a comic book called Malice that makes a person named Tall Jake come and take the person, that did the ritual, away from the real world into Malice. Everyone who’s heard of the book believes that it’s a rumor and wouldn’t happen but Luke disappears the next day, leaving his friends Seth and Kady wondering if the rumor is actually true. Seth and Kady go to Luke’s house to see if there’s any clues that could help them find Luke. While looking around Luke’s bedroom Seth finds a copy of Malice but the pages were blank and Kady discovers that Luke has last searched up a location of a comic book store, so they go there to get a copy of Malice without blank pages. At the store they meet the owner of the store but whenever Malice is mentioned, he insists that he doesn’t own any copies of it. Seth finds many copies of Malice which are hidden in a room and steals a copy, as Kady distracts the owner; they hurriedly walk back to Kady’s house to read Malice, in which they realize that Luke is in the book.

Normally, I don’t read horror books but this one was engaging enough for me to not put it back down. It’s not as typical as the horror books I have read because the scariness didn’t seem forced “He spun around, but there was nobody…Just for an instant…He’d seen someone standing in front of the door of the shower. Someone very tall” (Wooding 100). A right amount of suspense was deposited in certain scenes. Also, there were a few comic sections in the book, which was fitting with the story. The times when they had the graphic novel sections was when Seth and Kady look in Malice to see what’s going on with Luke, “She looked up at him, puzzlement and horror on her face. ‘The boy in this comic…it’s Luke” (Wooding 64). For sure, the style of this book is