A good place to start with Devil’s Island by Frank de Sales is to say what it isn’t.  It has nothing to do whatsoever with the French penal colony of the same name.  Even in appearance, it isn’t your typical book.  With a smaller than usual type face and bright white paper with a glossy cover, even the design of the slightly unusually sized novel makes it stand out on the shelves of retailers.  It isn’t what you’d expect from a first time author either – far too many strings left untied at the end, clichéd characters who are poorly developed, etc.  In fact, when was the last time the Midwest Book Review branded a first novel by an unknown author published by what looks like the newest publishing house (anyone heard of Margins Press?) ‘highly recommended’?  Furthermore, the use of a flash game to promote a book is rather cool.  Play it yourself at www.weblistings.co.za/devils_island.

It might sound well worn to say that Devil’s Island is a clash between good and evil.  It is however.  If you’re anticipating that the book is a straightforward old fashioned moral romp in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson, you’re wrong.  It might sit on the shelf with Stephen King or Dean Koontz but it doesn’t seem to yearn for that edge modern horror is so good at digesting.  Devil’s Island breaks the mould.  In an ideal world, Devil’s Island would do to modern horror what Nirvana did to poser-hair metal: kill it and replace it with a better foundation.  From the moment a fat Londoner realises the consequences of upsetting Britain’s most violent criminal and that he’s going to have to kill him in order to escape with his own life, to the point where the other principal character breaks down in front of a corporate bully only to find himself spurred on by an anger he can’t control, a ride into something very dark is promised.  Both find themselves on what they’ve been led to believe is a tropical paradise, the fat guy looking to clear his nagging conscious by doing some good with a local priest, the other by trying to mend fences with his fiancé at the luxury resort.  What they don’t know, if fact nobody knows it except the few who’ve had the misfortune of having to live alongside it, is that the volcano on the island is a portal into hell and the whole set-up exists only to attract the gullible and stupidly-wealthy so that they can be corrupted through a series of hallucinations into a hedonistic orgy that ensures they’ll never do any good again.  Think Fantasy Island meets MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 meets the busiest day ever at a morgue.  The fat guy gets in on the secret early, the anxious one only finds out when his girlfriend flips out and he has to flee into the forest and find refuge with the priest and his malcontents.  From there they take on an exorcism as horrible as anything in Rosemary’s Baby or The Omen.  Confronted by a series of ever increasing visits from personal demons (and incredibly, this stays entirely believable), they sink deeper and deeper into a hellish existence that they both realise can only get worse.

It wouldn’t be good versus evil if you didn’t suspect how it would all end.  Gore, agony, death, murder, more blood and violence are contrasted with the sorts of lifestyle we look for without anticipating the true price thereof. 

Well worth it!