Curse of the Werewolf Boy

Chris Priestley's Curse of the Werewolf Boy is a gloomy, very silly school mystery for 9 year olds in which two boys decide to become detectives.

What happens

Mildew and Sponge are at Maudlin Towers, a grim old school where the sports master makes them run up hills with backpacks for extra torture. On one of those runs, Mildew borrows Sponge's telescope and spots a man running along the ditch at the edge of the sports field. He's wearing a winged helmet. He's carrying an axe.

There's a Viking in the grounds. Nobody believes them, of course.

Then the School Spoon vanishes from the trophy room (the boys were in there and heard somebody sneeze). The Headmaster is devastated and the school's fierce vicar warns that parents will be summoned. For the boys that's the most terrifying threat there is!

So Mildew decides they'll solve it themselves, just like Finlay Feathering, the hero of his favourite detective books. Their method is wonderful. Everyone is a suspect, starting with the Headmaster. Kenningworth, the boy who keeps cuffing them round the ear, is ruled out for being too obviously awful to be guilty. And a red herring, Mildew explains, could be anything at all, even a pair of slippers or a vicar.

Meanwhile another boy has seen a wailing lady in a white gown in the attic. And their history teacher, Mr Luckless, has suddenly become very interesting and keeps getting his days muddled up.

It's almost all conversation, and the pair of them are very funny together. Sponge is scared of everything and Mildew is sure of everything, usually wrongly. The teachers are just as good. The maths teacher asks for the square root of Thursday, and the art teacher tells a boy off for using colour when what's needed is gloom.

The humour is dark in places (a teacher has died over the half-term holiday and the groundsman's slip about burying him is played for a laugh). If your reader enjoys that deadpan sort of joke, they'll love it. If they're more of a worrier, it's worth reading the first chapter or two together.

There might be a ghost or two (possibly), but it's a comedy first, and the clues keep piling up in a way that makes you want to guess along.

What to read next

If the mix of gloom and giggles goes down well, The Bad Beginning is in the library too. It follows three children through a grey, miserable run of luck, and the narrator warns you on the very first page that there's no happy ending coming. Somehow it's still very funny.