Written by Herbie Brennan, The Shadow Project is a YA novel that tells the story of a British government-run operation to use people with enough imagination to project their conscious minds outside their bodies (mostly teenagers and young adults) spying on terrorists for the government, only to quickly discover forces far more terrifying and otherworldly at play.
Tropes:
- Cassandra Truth: Danny is accused of murder and treason after truthfully claiming that another project official was killed by a strange monster that appeared out of nowhere. However, the surveillance tapes prove he is being honest.
- Skewed Priorities: When Danny's grandmother Dorothy has a stroke, the neighbor who finds her goes to her own house to call an ambulance to avoid the call being on Dorothy's phone bill, which is sweet but a bit absent-minded given the circumstances.
- Token Trio: Danny, Opal and Michael, the main trio, are a Caucasian boy and girl from England and a black boy from Mali.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Sir Roland, Carradine, the kids, and other agents serving them think they are in a straightforward The War on Terror Spy Fiction story with Science Fiction elements that they can plan for accordingly, when really they are in an Urban Fantasy Divine Conflict story.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The postscript notes that there was a real government-sponsored astral projection project in the 1980s that is a predecessor of the Shadow Project In-Universe.
