Below is the complete list of Anthony Horowitz’s Power Of Five/The Gatekeepers books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Power Of Five/The Gatekeepers Books
About Power Of Five/The Gatekeepers
Anthony Horowitz’s Power of Five series is a dark young adult fantasy-thriller sequence about five children destined to stand against an ancient evil known as the Old Ones. The books combine modern suspense with occult horror, global conspiracy, supernatural powers, and mythic conflict. They are very different in tone from Horowitz’s Alex Rider novels: instead of espionage, gadgets, and intelligence agencies, the danger here comes from forces that predate recorded history and from human collaborators willing to reopen the gates that once kept those forces out of the world.
The series begins with Raven’s Gate, which introduces Matt Freeman, a troubled fourteen-year-old caught after a petty crime and sent to a remote Yorkshire village under a foster-care arrangement. What appears to be punishment and rural isolation becomes something much more sinister when Matt realizes that the people around him are connected to an old ritual and to Raven’s Gate itself. The first book works as a contained supernatural thriller, but it also reveals that Matt is only one of five Gatekeepers whose powers and shared destiny are necessary to resist the Old Ones.
As the sequence develops, the scale widens dramatically. Evil Star takes Matt beyond England and into a conflict involving Peru, ancient lines of power, and a second gate. Nightrise shifts the focus to the United States and introduces twins Jamie and Scott Tyler, whose telepathic abilities make them targets for a corrupt organization. That change in viewpoint is important because the series is not simply Matt’s story. Horowitz gradually assembles the five children, each with different abilities, backgrounds, fears, and forms of isolation, until the larger pattern becomes clear.
The Gatekeepers are not conventional superheroes. Their powers matter, but the books emphasize vulnerability more than triumph. They are young, separated, manipulated, hunted, and forced into danger by adults who often understand only fragments of the truth. This gives the series a harsher emotional texture than a simple chosen-one fantasy. Destiny does not protect them from fear, injury, betrayal, or loss. It gives them responsibility before they have had the chance to live ordinary lives.
Necropolis brings Scarlett Adams into the center of the story and moves much of the action to Hong Kong, where the supernatural war increasingly merges with political control, surveillance, and urban menace. By the final book, Oblivion, the series has shifted into a devastated future shaped by the Old Ones’ return. The last volume is broader, bleaker, and more apocalyptic than the earlier books, pulling the separated Gatekeepers toward the final confrontation while showing what failure has already cost the world.
One point that can cause confusion is the series’ relationship to Horowitz’s earlier Pentagram books. The Power of Five is an updated and expanded reworking of that unfinished 1980s project, with the first four books substantially reshaping earlier material and Oblivion completing the five-part design. The series is also known in the United States as The Gatekeepers, so readers may see the same books grouped under a different title.
Publication order gives the clearest experience because each book reveals another Gatekeeper, another part of the mythology, and another stage in the Old Ones’ return. The structure depends on escalation: a local village horror becomes a global supernatural war, and the children’s scattered stories gradually become one shared destiny. The result is one of Horowitz’s darkest youth series, built around the frightening idea that ancient evil does not need to conquer the world alone—it only needs human beings willing to open the door.