Chaos

June 15, 2009
Released simultaneously, these two books demonstrate the difficulty of converting prose novels into graphic fiction, especially when a complicated backstory is involved. Bestselling Christian writer Dekker wrote the YA Lost Books series to fill a gap in the chronology of his adult Circle trilogy, which chronicles a long struggle between the forces of darkness and light in our Earth and a fantastic parallel world. At the beginning of the series, four young people are given the mission of finding the seven missing Books of History to secure the continuity of reality. In Renegade, the hotheaded Bilios uses a forbidden book to transport himself to a small Colorado town, where a dark stranger convinces him that the people aren't real so that it's okay to kill them. In Chaos, young Johnis and Silvie are transported to Las Vegas, into the middle of a scheme by a monstrous Shataiki bat to unite the books and bring his mate into this world so they can spawn. The dynamic but uncredited artwork is good, but these adaptations are too plot dense to be satisfying. Readers may turn to Dekker's novels if they're intrigued by this combination of C.S. Lewis and Stephen King.