Night­mares in Par­adise is the sec­ond book in Aden Polydoros’s Ring of Solomon tril­o­gy, star­ring now thir­teen-year-old Zach. The dra­ma begins at the Passover seder table, where Zach’s younger sis­ter, Nao­mi, pub­licly reveals a secret escapade from book one in which she helped Zach keep the world from end­ing. Furi­ous, Zach chas­tis­es her for say­ing any­thing, while their father chas­tis­es him for fill­ing her head with scary sto­ries. Nao­mi storms upstairs and dis­ap­pears — real­ly dis­ap­pears — from the house, the neigh­bor­hood, and pos­si­bly the planet.

One day, just as Zach is about to get pum­meled in the school­yard, an unearth­ly pres­ence that looks like danc­ing sun­light and the thrash­ing of many wings comes to res­cue him. This pres­ence, the archangel Uriel, turns the uber-bul­ly and his two fol­low­ers to salt. Ash shows up soon after, brag­ging that he sum­moned Uriel, who guards the gates of Eden, to help. But he also warns that the archangel is no friend to either of them. He believes Uriel has trans­port­ed Nao­mi up to Eden, She­haqim, the third heav­en, through a tear in the uni­verse, and they make plans for Ash to lead Zach and his friend San­dra there to res­cue Nao­mi. In the tremen­dous labyrinth that is Eden, they encounter Hoopoes, the shamir, and more shed­im, as well as spir­its, demons, and angels — all of which take many forms and are capa­ble of both good and evil. Lilith, the first woman, cursed for her inde­pen­dence, whose chil­dren (lilin) die dai­ly here, and her friend Sabine, a vam­pire, want to race Zach and San­dra to the Tree of Life for its prized fruit: Naomi’s life. Turns out, Lilith and Ash once dat­ed, and the tree itself is dying.

Poly­doros keeps things mov­ing with humor, cin­e­mat­ic scenes, and bold and breezy dia­logue. About the Jew­ish hol­i­days, Zach says: ​“The major­i­ty of them could be summed up in one sim­ple phrase — they tried to kill us, we sur­vived, let’s eat!” The King of the Demons boasts, ​“Every human alive or dead is a mere rain­drop in the sea of my long and illus­tri­ous exis­tence.” Some of the author’s unique twists, such as leav­ing the wine cup for Eli­jah out­side the front door, may mis­lead read­ers for whom this is a first encounter with Juda­ic rit­u­al and history.

Night­mares in Par­adise shines when Zach speaks of want­i­ng to be accept­ed by his class­mates and his father, who asks, ​“Can’t you just be a nor­mal kid for once?” He tells San­dra how being gay has made him feel mon­strous and alien­at­ed his whole life. His friend­ship with the dra­mat­ic demon Ash has been impor­tant in mak­ing him feel valuable.