(yes, I know, I should be watching Red Cliff 2. We seem to have hit a technical snag, so I’m lazing about on the internet instead)

Found this quite by accident, while browing in a bookshop: they’re reissuing Horowitz’s Power of Five as Raven’s Gate, Evil Star, Nightrise and Nekropolis. Basically, it’s the story of five children, who a long time before, sealed an ancient evil away from the world. Now eons have passed, and the children have reincarnated in the 20th-century world, where they have forgotten their powers–and it’s a bad time, too, because what they sealed away wants out, and it’s sending a number of unpleasant people after them. It’s way less cutesy than it seems, at least in the versions I read, which scared the crap out of me when I was twelve or so.

What I remember reading were books with different titles, namely The Devil’s Doorbell, The Night of the Scorpion The Silver Citadel, and The Day of the Dragon. From the Wikipedia summary, there seem to be a fair amount of differences between the books and the ones I read, not least that a lot of the characters seem to have changed names (and, in some cases, genders: I remember the hero of book 4 was an English guy named Will, but now he seems to be a Chinese girl going by Scarlett). Going by the summaries, the plot of book 4 seems to be radically different, too…

Not sure whether to order them or not–if Horowitz gets around to writing book 5, I would love to finally read the end of that series, which has always left me frustrated–but I’m afraid they’re going to be too radically different from those books I remember and treasure…