Styx

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Trapped by an earthquake deep below the earth’s surface, an international party of archaeologists must make its perilous way back to light and life by following a dark river, which they have half-seriously named “The Styx” for classical mythology’s River of Hell.

The survivors of the rockslide have been drawn into the terrifying adventure by the discovery of the Subrano Cave paintings in Yugoslavia, the work of a Neanderthal artist of prehistoric times. Somehow, mystically, across the countless ages that separate them, the cave artist becomes their guide through the eerie blackness that seems all too likely to become their last resting place. Threatened by rock slides, poisonous termites, drowning, or slow starvation, the poor remnants of the team struggle through unmeasured subterranean miles in an exciting and fast-paced adventure of disaster and survival.