The novels deal heavily in the occult and examples of things such as human sacrifice and blood rituals are major plot elements, such as in the first book, where Matthew Freeman is hunted by a Cult who want to conduct a blood sacrifice on him to blast open a portal using a combination of nuclear physics and black magic, to unlock another dimension which is holding a group of ancient evil demons captive.

The librarian tells Matt to go to the Greater Malling Gazette to find articles on Raven's Gate, and there he meets Richard Cole, a young journalist working there.

Since Matt suspects that there is something odd about Omega One, they meet with the engineer who designed and built it, Sir Michael Marsh, but find out nothing except how a nuclear power plant works.

They were dark creatures who survived on human misery many years ago, and once wanted to rule the world, but were transported to another dimension by five children with supernatural powers.

According to Dravid, Mrs Deverill and the villagers of Lesser Malling are part of a group of witches who seek the return of the Old Ones by opening Raven's Gate using witchcraft.

Matt and Pedro break into Salamanda's headquarters with some help of the Incas in an attempt to stop his plan by destroying the radio mast controlling the satellite.

This story begins with two men, Colton Bane and Kyle Hovey, who work for an evil corporation called Nightrise, waiting outside a theatre in Reno, Nevada.

Desperate, Jamie commands Warren Cornfeld, Trelawny's bodyguard and would-be assassin (being controlled by Scott), to aim the gun at Susan Mortlake.

Scarlett Adams' school tutor group is taken on a trip to St Meredith's Church where she sees a vision of Matt Freeman, who leads her to the door with the pentagram etched into it.

In Peru, at Professor Chambers' hacienda, Matt finds out who Scarlett is through the media storm and decides that he should go back to London with the rest of the Five and his friend Richard Cole.

After studying the diary using his skills of reading old maps he learnt at university, Richard says that there are doors in Tuscany, Lake Tahoe, Cuzco, London, Ukraine, Cairo, Istanbul, Delhi, Mecca, Buenos Aires, the Australian outback, Antarctica and Hong Kong.

Matt decides that the Five should split up so that the Old Ones cannot capture them all in one shot, and he, Jamie and Richard go to find Scarlett while Pedro and Scott go to the hidden Inca city of Vilcabamba to stay.

Shang-tung explains that Scarlett has been taken prisoner by the Old Ones who plan to turn Hong Kong into a necropolis, a city of the dead, by using poisonous gases mixed with the pollution from mainland China that will suffocate and kill the residents there.

He knew that the only way to get near her was to be caught, so he had contacted Lohan and his men earlier, telling them of his plan, and then Scarlett's father had agreed to call Nightrise in order to turn in Matt, even at expense of his own life.

The group, along with Scarlett, who diverts the storm from them while it destroys everything around them, run to the temple to kill the guards protecting it before Scott arrives, which would result in his death or capture.

[citation needed] After a botched warehouse theft which culminated in the stabbing of a security guard, Matt is placed on the LEAF project (Liberty and Education Achieved through Fostering).

After spending three days in a fever hearing people talk about him in a sinister fashion and seeing an odd ritual going on in the remains of an abandoned nuclear power plant he encounters Richard Cole, a local journalist.

[citation needed] After speaking with the nuclear plant's creator, Sir Michael Marsh and two members from a shadowy organisation known as Nexus, Matt realised that he was one of five Gatekeepers, reincarnated after ten thousand years.

He uses his powers to save the entire school from being blown up by his possessed aunt Gwenda driving a petrol tanker, after murdering her boyfriend Brian Conran with a kitchen knife.

[citation needed] Matt only makes two very brief appearances in Nightrise: in a flashback when he was left to die in the desert and Richard Cole rescues him, and at the end of the book when he and Pedro meet Jamie and Scott Tyler at Professor Chambers's hacienda.

[citation needed] Scarlett manages to protect her and the others with her powers and they finally reach a temple with a magic door, which can take them safely back to Peru.

At one point Matt is able to crack and push apart an Antarctic ice shelf to create a chasm "... hundreds of meters deep ..." and has Scarlett Adams wondering "... if there was any limit to his power ..."[citation needed] Pedro is the second of the Five and is first introduced in the second book, Evil Star.

He discovered that during the stay with his carer Sebastian in Ciudad del Veneno, known as Poison Town in English, none of the people around him got sick due to his healing abilities, and when Matt slept at the house where Pedro lived he noticed his scars from a previous fight had vanished.

Jamie and Scott are orphans who, after several failed fostering attempts, ended up with an abusive guardian known as 'Uncle Don' where they were forced to work as part of a magic act in Reno, Nevada, USA.

After a performance Scott is kidnapped and both physically and mentally tortured by the sinister Nightrise Corporation at a privately owned juvenile prison called Silent Creek, in the outskirts of Nevada.

Jamie arrives in time to stop Scott, who had been brainwashed into killing Senator Trelawney, in order for Nightrise's candidate, Charles Baker, to win the election.

Scarlett is first found by the Old Ones when she goes through one of the doorways in St Meredith's Church while on a school trip, and ends up in the Cry For Mercy in Ukraine, where she is captured by a monk who tells her the story of who she is, and makes a narrow escape.

Her father, Paul Adams, worked for the Nightrise Corporation and forced Scarlett to fly to Hong Kong to see him, saying that a crisis had arisen, although it was a trap as the Old Ones had control of the city and knew she was a Gatekeeper.

She is a witch who practices satanic rituals and dark magic and she was a key component in the plot to sacrifice Matt to the old ones to open ravens get to let them into the world.

Two of them were Jayne Deverill and Sir Michael Marsh, who sought to free Chaos and the Old Ones from Raven's Gate by using the blood of one of the Gatekeepers, now reincarnated as teenagers.