Welcome to Everworld

If you were a kid in the '90's, chances are you crossed paths with the book series Animorphs in some way. Written by K.A. Applegate and Michael Grant, this sci-fi/action epic about kids turning into animals to fight off an alien invasion was one of the Scholastic Corporation's most popular IP's of that decade, rivaled only by Goosebumps. It had sixty-four books, numerous video games and toy lines, a TV show that ran for two seasons on Nickelodeon, and even cross promotions with fast food chains like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut that sold Animorphs collectibles with their kids' meals. An official graphic novel adaptation is now in the works, and the series still has a devout fanbase.

And rightly so. I started reading Animorphs at age nine, and to this day, it's easily one of the most powerful and formative works of literature that I've ever read. It was funny but tragic, relatable but imaginative, entertaining but horrific, and it often hit you with a sobering dose of reality that made the message of each book stay with you long after you finished reading. Best of all, its mature themes and ideas about the morality of war have made it just as meaningful and relevant to read as an adult as it did as a kid, so I highly recommend the series.

With that said, I want to discuss another book series that Applegate and Grant wrote during that same time called Everworld.

I occasionally saw ads for this series in the backs of the Animorphs books (exactly four of them), but the ads were always vague, and eventually those back pages were used to advertise other things. A promotional CD called The Everworld Experience was given out in bookstores upon the third Everworld book's release, but if the series was ever sold in Scholastic's monthly school catalogues or at any of its school book fairs, I can't find evidence of that. Botton line, it barely had any of the exposure or success that Animorphs did, and the series came to an earlier-than-planned conclusion after two years and twelve books.

This is a real shame, because now that I've finally sat down and read all of Everworld, I think the series is great. It deals with four Chicago teens (David, Christopher, April, and Jalil) who are dragged by a witch named Senna to a parallel world where the gods, monsters, and famous figures from all of Earth's mythologies live at constant odds with each other. The teens exist in this place, called Everworld, and on Earth simultaneously, with their consciousnesses jumping back and forth from one world to the other whenever they go to sleep. In addition to staying alive, their main goals in Everworld are to save it from an invading alien god named Ka Anor and to keep Senna from transporting more dangerous people to—and from—Earth.

I should start by saying that Everworld was written for an older audience than Animorphs; for high schoolers instead of middle schoolers. As a result, it has a much darker and grittier tone with less, shall we say, innocent protagonists. It shares a few themes with Animorphs, such as the stress of leading a secret double-life and having to compromise personal values for the greater good, but it also deals with themes like letting go of old perceptions as you grow up, realizing the cost of your deepest desires, and deciding whether to keep to the safe life you know or venture into a greater unknown.

Everworld's premise is clearly a metaphor for coming of age, a representation of the crossroads between childhood and adulthood where you need to start finding a direction for your life. For all of its fantastic settings and elements, the series is really about the four main characters' internal conflicts, not the external conflict around them. The external conflict is just a device that serves to make the characters deal with their internal conflicts, and this is important to keep in mind when reading the series. We don't see much of how the teens change Everworld by getting involved in its dealings, just how much deciding to get involved changes them.

As for the characters themselves, I think we're given a pretty well-rounded and relatable main cast. We have David, the self-appointed leader who feels unfulfilled in his normal life and is desperate to prove his worth due to his toxic masculine upbringing; Christopher, the less-than-sensitive class clown who leans on immature humor and sitcoms to cope with his problems; April, the wily, religious idealist who takes care of business when she needs to; and Jalil, the level-headed skeptic who tries to learn the science of everything so he can master it. A huge part of the overarching conflict is these four learning to get along and work together, and once that starts to happen, they become a fun group of friends to go through all of these crazy adventures with.

I've read complaints that some of their early character flaws (especially Christopher's tendencies towards xenophobic humor) turn off a lot of readers after the first few books. That's understandable, but the point of giving the characters those flaws is that they eventually see the error of their ways and reform. I don't approve of Christopher's intial brand of humor, but I actually like him the most out of the four because he undergoes the biggest and most dramatic transformation throughout the series. You see how finding a life goal in a world where he can't tune out reality so easily makes him a better person.

The other major character is Senna the witch, who really serves as the main antagonist of the series. Not that she's a villain; a major part of the story is trying to figure out her motives and allegiances, since she seems to help the four leads as often as she gets them in trouble. We even get a book narrated by her eventually, and that does a great job of swaying you to feel one way about her right before the series yanks you in the other direction. She's not as complicated as Snape from Harry Potter or Gollum from Lord of the Rings (even though she does shape-shift into him in one rather amusing scene) but I found her arc just as engrossing and its conclusion extremely rewarding. The whole series is worth reading just to get that rush at the end.

And that level of engagement is the ultimate reason why I recommend Everworld. It's one of the most immersive works I've read in a while, both in setting and tone. It takes you right back to the '90's from Page 1 with its now-nostalgic pop culture references and laid-back view of the world, and then it slowly pokes at that bubble with an ominous undertone until all hell finally breaks loose. The descriptions of Everworld effectively capture the feel of every location and threat, and Applegate and Grant's tongue-in-cheek humor goes a long way in keeping the series self-aware enough to avoid turning hokey. One of my favorite parts is in Book 4 when the teens try to catch a wild boar for food, only to have it beat them up and then suddenly order them in English to give it what little food they do have. It becomes a running joke after incidents like this for David, Christopher, April, and Jalil to mumble, "W.T.E. Welcome to Everworld," and then move on with their business.

Also, borrowing so many of its settings and characters from preexisting mythologies (with the authors' own creative twists, of course) builds anticipation as you wonder what other pantheons the series might explore as it goes on. It also gives the protagonists some prior knowledge going into each conflict, especially when some of them start using their "visits" back to Earth to research mythology. This helps endear them to readers by showing their proactive sides, as well as their overarching growth throughout the series as they start trying to help Everworld instead of escape from it.

What's interesting though is that the scenes on Earth are also very descriptive and immersive. It's easy in cross-world narratives like this for the "real world" to take a back seat to the more creative fantasy world, but the Earth scenes in Everworld have their own overarching story that also builds into a genuinely suspenseful conflict. This really sells the idea that David, Christopher, April, and Jalil still have some grounding in their normal lives that keeps holding them back from fully embracing their new lives in Everworld.

With that said, I do wish that their families had more of a presence in the series. The families in Animorphs were very well defined and prominent in a lot of the B-plots of some books. This made us like them almost as much as the Animorphs themselves by the end of the series, which raised the stakes tremendously whenever things started to escalate. In Everworld, we see the families occasionally but get very little sense of their personalities or the teens' relationships with them.

I don't think either of David's parents ever makes an appearance throughout the whole series, and I actually forgot for a while if Jalil's mother was even alive until he mentions her in one of the other characters' books. Things like this make it hard to feel the full emotional weight of certain events near the end of the series. I guess the idea is that teenagers going through major life changes like these just aren't always that close to their families, but it still feels like this particular element of the story could have had a little more focus to sell how torn the characters are between their two lives.

It's worth noting that Christopher's parents and brother probably get the most character out of all the families, with scenes as early as the second book showing their interests and personalities as they banter with him. Given his similarities to Marco, the main comedic character from Animorphs, I'm starting to think Christopher was the authors' favorite lead as well.

Also, one of the Earth antagonists in Everworld is named Mr. Trent. This was also the human alias of the main villain on the Animorphs TV show, which predates Everworld. I can't find any information on how both of these characters came to have the same name, as Applegate and Grant didn't write the TV show, but it certainly has me conjuring all kinds of theories about the two book series existing in the same universe.

So why wasn't Everworld more successful if it's so good? Why didn't Scholastic advertise the hell out of it to at least try and hook the millions of Animorphs fans back then?

Sadly, I think the answer lies in the reader demographics. When you're dealing with kids, a couple of years can mean a huge difference in maturity and what's considered appropriate material for them. Animorphs was surprisingly graphic and intense for a children's book series, but it was still written for children. I can't recall a single swear word ever being said in it, and things like drugs, sex, and xenophobia were either very vaguely implied, disguised in metaphors, or presented as problems that the alien characters (not the humans) struggle with.

The very first Everworld book features flashbacks where David recalls seeing a camp counselor molest a child and hearing a football coach call a player the "F" word for not being tough enough on the field—and they don't just say "the 'F' word" in the book either. Add a few dollops of religion, sexuality, infidelity, teen alcoholism, and other adult language throughout each book, and there was no way Scholastic could promote this series to the same kids who read Animorphs. The Everworld books don't even have that bright red Scholastic logo at the bottoms of their covers; there's just a tiny, inconspicuous logo on the spine and an even less conspicuous trademark credit on the back.

Again, I can't currently find any information about this. I'm very curious to know how this situation came to be though. Did Scholastic give the authors more leeway for Everworld because of Animorphs' success and then found out too late how far the pair had run with that? Did the company want to experiment with publishing more adult material but then started getting cold feet closer to Everworld's release?

The worst part of this, if it's true, is that Scholastic may have been right to worry. According to some of the YouTube comments and online book reviews I've read, a lot of kids who read Animorphs in the '90's were barred by their parents from reading Everworld. Some say their parents found the series too dark and inappropriate. Some say their parents took issue with it for religious reasons, due to all the pagan deities that it shows to exist. One person even said they were almost barred from Animorphs too after their parents vetoed Everworld. Not the kind of thing a Scholastic executive in 1999 would have wanted to hear.

I know that Scholastic would go on to publish the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series over the next decade, and both of those saw their share of controversy too. All things considered though, I do side a little with the parents when it comes to Everworld. The topics that I listed three paragraphs ago are important for teens to discuss, and it's realistic to include them in a story about teens, but I feel like the series presents them a little too bluntly for me to totally disagree with the parental discretion. There's an entire book about a lustful underworld goddess who does nothing but capture men and force them to "please" her under threat of castration, and there's an ongoing subplot where April questions what the existence of all the different pagan deities in Everworld means for her own Catholic beliefs. Even if this series had come out today, there would be a legitimate reason for the concerns.

I'll never say to bar your kids from reading anything, but here's a thing to consider: the main characters in Animorphs are roughly thirteen years old at the start of the series, they're sixteen by the last book, and the Everworld characters are sixteen throughout their series. Maybe letting your kids read Animorphs first and giving them a chance to mature alongside those characters is a good gauge for when you think they'd be old enough to read Everworld.

And if they decide for themselves that they don't want to read Everworld, then that's them choosing a direction in life, just like the series would want them to make.