Days of Magic, Nights of War (2004) is the second book in a series of five by author Clive Barker, called The Books of Abarat. This volume contains the adventures of Candy Quackenbush an ordinary girl from Minnesota, in the strange fantasy world of Abarat. Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War is followed by, Absolute Midnight, which will be followed by a fourth and fifth book to complete the saga. The book tied with Steve Burt's Oddest Yet for the 2004 Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers. Plot summary The entire book is spread out over eight weeks of time, compared to the two or three in Book 1, titled simply Abarat. The book picks up several weeks after the original had left off; Candy Quackenbush and Malingo the Geshrat (a character introduced in the first book) have traveled from Hour to Hour to evade the bounty hunter Otto Houlihan. Christopher Carrion's whereabouts are revealed only in the second quarter of the book, wherein he plots with the Sacbrood in the Pyramids of Xuxux. Sacbrood are terrifying insects of all shapes and sizes which Christopher Carrion has been breeding in order to help him create Absolute Midnight. Under the cover produced by the Sacbrood, he expects, the destroyers called the Requiax will emerge from under the Sea of Izabella (which surrounds the Abarat) and annihilate everything they see, giving Carrion the opportunity to re-organize the world according to his will. Candy begins to develop powers of great magic, with which she frees the mysterious beings called Totemix from their imprisonment in the Twilight Palace on the island of Scoriae. Malingo, separated from her on the carnival island of Babilonium, joins with others of Candy's acquaintance to form a force of resistance against the armies of Midnight. Candy is eventually captured by Letheo, the lizard-boy servant of Christopher Carrion, and taken to the island Efreet. The enchantress Diamanda, having died of an encounter with a monster, travels as a ghost to the human world, where she finds her also ghostly husband Henry and with him works to prepare Candy's home town for the flood resulting from its imminent meeting with the Abarat. When this meeting occurs, Henry's opening of the factory farm which is the town's only industrial outlet is used as a comment on the variety-deprived lives of chickens raised in such factories. This book introduces