The Beast of Noor (review)

Miles and Hanna have always been outsiders in their village; they are Sheens, descendents of the infamous Rory Sheen, who traded his faithful bear hound to the soul-collecting Darro on the night of the Wild Hunt in exchange for his life. The Darro rarely makes bargains, but he'd seen the strength and loyalty of the dog as it fearlessly attacked his ghost hounds, so he turned the man's betrayal of his protector into a curse, transforming the dog into Shriker, a shape-shifting immortal hell hound. For 250 years after Rory's death, the Shriker was nothing more than a scary tale, but then he mysteriously reappeared in the woods, luring human prey to grisly deaths in years with lunar eclipses. Miles vows to find a way to kill the beast and break the curse that haunts his family, and Hanna reluctantly finds herself caught up in the quest, which takes them into the fairy realm of Oth. A complex blend of superstitions and folklore from the Celtic tradition, this tale transforms its many borrowings into a world of nightmare and dream, marked by sometimes overly ornamental images as familiar as our fears and as strange as our most fantastic imaginings. At its center are two devoted teenaged siblings straining in different ways against their destinies: Miles wants to pursue magic no matter what the cost, and Hanna seeks to deny her talent for magic in favor of living a simple life. They counterbalance each other in ways that ensure their survival and negotiate Miles' arrogance and Hanna's fearfulness into more settled and complex maturities, making this a compelling and nuanced exploration of self-understanding as well as a suspenseful plot-driven fantasy. The relatively minor thematic currents of mutual responsibility and savagery constrained by loyalty will play especially well with dog lovers who appreciate the dogness of their dogs.