Running with the Demon

Running with the Demon is a fantasy novel by the American writer Terry Brooks, first published in 1997 by the Del Rey division of Ballantine. It is the first book of the Word and Void series, and it is followed by A Knight of the Word.

The setting is Sinnissippi Park in the town of Hopewell, Illinois, where creatures of a malevolent kind have been hidden for many years. The ordinary life of the town is going on above them.

John Ross is one of the two figures at the centre of the book. He is drawn to Hopewell by nightmares that tell him an unspeakable evil is about to be loosed on the world, and he has come to stop it, though he is not the only one involved. It is the first of a series that continues in A Knight of the Word.

Nest Freemark is the other. She is a teenager with powers that she has not learned to control and does not fully understand, and she uses what she has in the struggle between good and evil that the novel is about.