Crater Lake

Jennifer Killick's Crater Lake is a properly creepy thriller for 11 year olds about a school trip that goes wrong before the coach has even arrived.

What happens

Lance and his Year Six class are nearly at Crater Lake. It's a newly built activity centre in what's thought to be an old meteor crater, and they're the first school to try it.

Then a hand covered in blood slaps the coach window. It belongs to a man in a Crater Lake polo shirt, who begs them to turn round because "they'll get us all". (The teachers decide he's bumped his head and carry on.)

At the centre there's no phone signal and no staff. There's just a huge man called Digger with spatters down his shirt, and dinner is tomato soup.

That night somebody locks every dormitory from the outside. Lance is the only pupil who gets missed. He's been given a room on his own for reasons he hasn't told even his best friends.

When he lets the others out, some of his classmates wake up with something very wrong with their eyes. They file off down the corridor one behind the other. All they'll say is "Work."

So it's five children against whatever has got into Crater Lake. And the one thing they can't do is fall asleep.

Lance tells the story and he's great company. He's sarcastic and always in trouble, and he'll stick up for his friends before he sticks up for himself.

Even with a bleeding man outside the coach he's explaining why it can't be a zombie (nothing stuck in his teeth). His best friend Chets is close to tears because the soup isn't Heinz.

It keeps doing that. A joke, then a jolt, then another joke.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This one is meant to be frightening and it is. There's a lot of blood on the injured man in the first two chapters.

A nature programme shows maggots bursting out of a caterpillar. Children and a teacher stop being themselves. There's mild swearing too, and a class bully with some nasty name-calling about weight and council estates.

If your reader already worries at bedtime, a story where sleep is the danger probably isn't the one. If they like being scared silly and laughing about it a page later, this is a very good pick.

What to read next

There's a second Crater Lake book in the library for afterwards. For a different Jennifer Killick scare, try Dread Wood. Four pupils who aren't friends are stuck in Saturday detention when a scream rings out across the empty school grounds.