The Devouring

Vours: Evil, demonic beings that inhabit human bodies on Sorry Night. They feed on human fears, and will attack on Sorry Night, which is a few days before Christmas. Reggie finds a journal that contains an account of them. She thinks it's a first draft of a horror book or something.

Her brother is eight. She's in high school, and has a male friend named Aaron. It's another Sorry Night, and Reggie and Aaron are playing around with the vour legend. While she and Aaron are talking, Henry gets taken over by a vour.

(A vour takes a person's soul. It might be similar to the New Age concept of 'walk in,” where another entity takes the place of a person's soul, but basically willingly. Then there's also demonic possession, which is, of course, not voluntary.)

Anyhow, Henry starts to act weird. It turns out their mother had left her husband after she had started acting very strange, so it's possible she's also a vour takeover.

Then it turns out Henry's babysitter dies while while supposedly taking care of him while Reggie is working at a bookstore. Henry behaves more and more bizarrely. He even becomes violent, injuring Reggie and killing his hamster.

Later Henry causes Reggie to see spiders in her room. She's terrified of spiders. Aaron, Reggie and Eben, the guy who owns the bookstore she works at, research the book she found and Eben, who had been skeptical, finally comes to believe in vours.

Reggie goes out on her own to confront a trapped vour and to swallow her fear, literally. Reggie confronts Henry, and enters the vour's domain.

The rest of the book involves a really frightening world, and Reggie's desperate attempts to save Henry, who is trapped in it. It also turns out that other people have been taken over by the vours, and one of them is trying to kill Aaron.

This is a very, very dark book and a very good one. I am assuming it's the first in a series.

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