Buried Fire

Jonathan Stroud's Buried Fire is a story for 11 year olds about a village that digs up something it should have left alone.

What happens

It starts underground. Beneath an old king's burial mound a dragon lies coiled round its hoard, so still it might be carved, and it has lain like that for a thousand years and more. To stop time getting at it, it has been squeezing its own memories out of itself, one by one. The discarded thoughts rise up through the earth and drift away over the grass.

One of them finds a boy asleep on the hilltop.

Michael MacIntyre wakes fifteen minutes later with his eyes burning and his tongue too swollen to speak. He decides it's sunstroke. It isn't sunstroke. When he finally cries, his tears hiss and steam.

Down in the village that same afternoon, workmen shoring up the church foundations turn up a carved stone cross with an animal wound across the front of it, and the new vicar climbs into the trench with his handkerchief to clean it off, thoroughly pleased with himself.

Neither of them knows what the other has found. That's the engine of the whole opening and it's beautifully done.

Michael lives with his older brother Stephen and his sister Sarah, who is the grown-up of the house. Their parents died on an icy moorland road ten months ago and the boys have been Sarah's ever since. She spends the evening at the window, certain something has happened to Michael and unable to say how she knows.

Reading it feels genuinely uneasy rather than exciting. Stroud keeps the summer heat pressing down on everything, and the village stays stubbornly ordinary while the dread builds underneath it. The vicar is sweaty and vain about his big find. An old woman sits in the pews telling him he's committing sacrilege. Your reader will work out what's happening to Michael long before any adult in the book does.

Now the honest part. Everybody in it is older than the reader. Sarah drives, works at an estate agency and is seeing the vicar. Stephen teases her about it. There's mild swearing scattered through, bloody hell and Christ and damn. Michael is violently sick twice on the hilltop and it's described plainly, and the whole thing turns on something getting inside a child.

So it's frightening in a slow, creeping way rather than a jumpy one, which some children much prefer and others can't bear. If that sounds like a stretch for your reader, it's one to come back to.

What to read next

If they take to the way Stroud builds dread, The Amulet of Samarkand is in the library too. A twelve year old apprentice magician summons a djinni to get his own back on a man who humiliated him, and the djinni narrates half the book with a very sharp tongue.