Underworlds: When Monsters Escape

Owen, John, and Sydney saved Dana from the Underworld, but that didn’t end their problems. Hades threatens to take Dana back forever unless Owen and his friends capture the cyclopes and bring them back to the Underworld.

When Owen and his friends discover that the cyclopes have taken over the power plant in Pinewood Bluffs, they know they must find a way to return the creatures to their world. However, they are not sure how to overcome the giants.

When Monsters Escape is as fun and action-packed as the first book in the series. Even though the friends are battling giant creatures, the scenes are not described with gory detail, which allows younger readers to be entertained without being frightened. However, the descriptions of the undead maybe a little frightening for some readers.

Sexual Content

• None

Violence

• Cyclopes come to Owen’s town. One “reached back and ripped a telephone out of the ground as if it were a weed. He threw it across the road in front of the car, which swerved up onto the sidewalk . . . the driver leaped out of the car and ran back up the road.”
• Owen and his friend must face three cyclopes. Owen uses Odysseus’ Nobody trick and Orpheus’s lyre on the cyclops. “. . . The hairy cyclops bellowed in pain, arching back into the wall next to me.”
• Loki throws fire bolts at the group.
• Draugs, which are undead creatures from Norse mythology, chase the group. Some of the draugs have axes and spears. Dana defeats them by using a powerful glove. “Dana spun like a ballerina, and blades of light swung around her like scythes. The ragged shrouds of the draugs caught fire.”
• Dana uses the glove to capture the cyclopes. “Chains swirled suddenly out of the storm like snakes and wound around the cyclopes’ wrists, binding the giants tightly together.”

Drugs and Alcohol

• None

Language

• None

Supernatural

• Draugs are in Owen’s town. They are described as “death walkers.” They are “dead Viking warriors who come back, like ghosts. After they die, their souls live on in their old dead form. Draugs are strong. Angry. Evil. And they can’t really die.”
• Runes are used to control others. When used, the stone tingles “and not in a good way.”
• Owen and his friends use a rune stone to transform into Draugs. “We all grabbed hold of the Draug thread and chanted strange runic names over and over . . . We grew larger, wider, our faces oozed facial hair—even the girls’—and our clothes turned gray and frayed. . . we didn’t feel dead. We just looked like it.”
• The cyclopes make armor for Loki that will make him indestructible. “The helmet wove bands of silver over his face. The horns on his head stuck out of the helmet and writhed as if alive.” Dana takes a sliver of the armor and “Loki’s armored glove was forming around her hand. It melted over her wrist and palm and fingers like liquid silver.”

Spiritual Content

• None