Demon Road Books in Order

The Demon Road trilogy takes Derek Landy's love of horror and road movies and sends it roaring across a twisted version of the United States. Instead of a cosy magical underworld in Ireland, you get haunted highways, cursed small towns and a demonic girl learning to survive in a world that wants to eat her.

The series begins with Demon Road and sixteen year old Amber Lamont, a shy Florida teenager who spends most of her time online. After a brutal encounter at home, she discovers that her parents and their friends are demons and that she is one too. Worse, they have made a long standing pact with a powerful being called the Shining Demon, and the time has come to pay their debt by sacrificing their own daughter.

Amber escapes with the help of Milo Sebastian, a quiet, dangerous man with an apparently sentient Dodge Charger, and Glen, a talkative Irish hitchhiker who has been told he only has forty days to live. Together they head out onto the Demon Road, a network of routes where every horror story feels like it might be real. Along the way they face undead serial killers, vampires, cursed cars and all sorts of monsters that nod to classic books and films without ever turning into simple parody.

In Desolation, Amber and Milo flee north to the isolated town of Desolation Hill. On the surface it looks like a place where monsters cannot follow and people might finally be safe. Underneath, the town keeps a terrible secret, and once a year its citizens give in to a kind of controlled madness that makes Amber's demonic side look tame. The book leans into small town paranoia and the feeling that the ground can shift under your feet at any time.

American Monsters brings the chase to a head. Amber is stronger, stranger and far less willing to run. Her parents are making one last grab for power, and the road leads her toward the brother and sister she never knew and the truth about what happened to them. Government style monster hunters, demonic politics and old debts all collide as Amber chooses what kind of future she is willing to fight for.

Throughout the trilogy the tone swings between grisly horror and quick, sarcastic humour. There are genuine scares and a fair amount of gore, but also warmth in the relationships that form inside Milo's car and in the way Amber slowly comes to like the person she is becoming. There are subtle links to the Skulduggery Pleasant universe for keen eyed readers, yet the trilogy stands on its own as a fast, bloody, character driven road trip for older teens and adults.