The Door Within Trilogy (Spoilers Included)

 I give you...The Door Within Trilogy by Wayne Thomas Batson!

While not marketed as a 'Christian' story, the Door Within by Batson is so heavily saturated with Christian symbolism that it falls into the same fiction category as Narnia or the Wilderking books.  I do think that someone could read it without noticing the faith aspects, of course.  There's no mention of Christ, no specifically Christian language used or anything like that, but the story has such a strong Christian flow to it that if you are at all familiar with Christianity, you will probably see it.

In this first book we are introduced to Aiden, who finds a set of scrolls in his Grandfather's basement and makes a decision to believe the story written in them.  It's a story about a king, Eliam (El-I-Am, yes.  Brush up on your Hebrew, friends!) who rules over the kingdom of Alleble with his twelve trusted knights.  He writes all of history into a magical book locked in a tower where he stores all knowledge.  Then he's betrayed by one of his knights, the evil Paragor who is overcome by his lust for power.  Paragor kills the king, and also kills a whole bunch of innocents, but King Eliam rises from the dead and Paragor is thrust into the wilds of the world, where he attempts to take over other kingdoms by pandering to the greed of their citizens.

Aiden shows this story to his father, who says something along the lines of 'oh, yeah I saw those scrolls in a bookstore once.  They're just one of those joke fantasy type things.  No one really believes them'.  Aiden can't shake the feeling that his father is wrong, however, and so he also shows them to his Grandfather, and HE says he also believes in Alleble and King Eliam, and that Aiden should make up his own mind, but that that scrolls speak the truth.  Aiden decides he also believes in the scrolls, and is taken away from Earth to the kingdom of Alleble.

Up to this point, the story is a little dry, to be honest.  Aiden is a very mopey, timid sort of boy and everyone around him seems sort of meh.  Nothing to write home about.  However, when Aiden gets swept to Alleble, I started to get drawn into the novel a lot more.  Here's where it could have gone down a very heavy handed religous path, and I was worried that would be the case, but actually I think Batson wove a very original and compelling narrative!

When Aiden arrives in Alleble, we learn that it is a kind of mirror world to Earth, and that all of the human-like creatures there are called Glimpses, and each Glimpse has a human counterpart.  This actually comes into play later when Aiden meets someone in Alleble who he knows from Earth.  Aiden is drafted into the king's twelve knights, and sent off on a quest to help bring a neighbouring kingdom under the protection of King Eliam, rather than Paragor.

There's a little bit of romance, sort of.  One of the knights is a girl named Gwenne and she and Aiden hold hands and once she kisses him on the cheek.  There is quite a bit of violence, on par with Wingfeather.  Some beloved characters die.  There isn't any questionable language.

You could just end with this book, which I actually like in a trilogy.  Sometimes you've visited an author's mind and it was fine and everything but you don't know that you're invested enough in the story to go through multiple more books in order to figure out how everything ends.  But in this case I think we WILL read the next two books, because I'm curious to see how the story arc ultimately ends.  At the conclusion of The Door Within, Aiden returns to Earth with the thought that he would not be allowed to return to the land of the Glimpses until he died and met them in the Land Beyond...

Hmmm....

Here are the next two books!