Nate Silva has enough to deal with at home, with a house full of unwanted relatives and the scars from his last encounters with the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods keeping him up at night, so there is no way he is looking west, no matter who warns him. But before he knows it, Nate finds himself press-ganged into service on Sorcerer, the airship that’s haunted his dreams since the last midnight games, and quickly discovers its terrifying secrets. Now Nate is headed just where he doesn’t want to go, to the Pacific Ocean, where a Great Old One, trapped for decades in the wreckage of a sunken ship, schemes to rise again from the undersea abyss called the Medusa Deep.

In this electrifying follow-up to his award-winning young-adult novel The Midnight Games, David Neil Lee takes Nate Silva to the rain-swept Pacific coast. There, with old and new friends, he once more confronts an ancient evil, all while the Resurrection Church threatens to return to power at home.

The Medusa Deep is the second book in David Neil Lee’s Midnight Games trilogy. It follows The Midnight Games in which teen Nate Silva interrupts one of the Midnight Games where worshippers of an alien being named Yog-Sothoth summon the creature to appear. Amidst the chaos that ensues, a large World War II airship called Sorcerer floats across the sky and forces the alien to return to its world before the airship vanishes.

An injured but still curious Nate emerges from the aftermath in The Medusa Deep in pursuit of answers about the aliens, the airship and his mother who has been missing since he was six years old. Nate finds the airship docked at an abandoned warehouse and is forced on board where he finds his mother with a team of time-travelling scientists who quickly return to the sky in search of their former friend and leader who is stuck in the world of The Great Old Ones.

After a harrowing escape from the airship on the back of another alien creature, Nate finds the mysterious H. P. Lovecraft—a man who helped him in the first book—and his grandfather, Sidney Fraser, who keeps watch over one of the aliens trapped in the Medusa Deep, a stretch of water along British Columbia’s Pacific Coast. But a research vessel accidentally sets the alien free to wreak havoc on the earth once again.

The Medusa Deep fulfills the expectation set in David Neil Lee’s Midnight Games of an action-driven adventure that combines alien fantasy with local history and geography. In this book, Nate is launched into the setting of World War II airships and the threat of Nazi occupation, only to be whisked away to the beautiful coastal setting of contemporary British Columbia—all while fighting against giant, insect-like aliens which are wonderfully described to the delight of any fan of creepy horror fiction. As the second installment of a trilogy, the book works well as a stand-alone although it leaves the reader wanting to read the backstory from the first book and waiting expectantly for the third and final volume: The Great Outer Dark. Warning: The reader will want to avoid large insects for the foreseeable future.

• James Steeves