Darkmouth 2 – Worlds Explode

Worlds Explode by Shane Hegarty is a monster-hunting adventure for 9 year olds about a boy searching for a way into the world that swallowed his father.

What happens

Finn lives in Darkmouth, the last town on earth where monsters still come through. His dad went into their world to fetch his mam back. He got her out and shoved Finn after her, and then the gateway shut with him on the wrong side of it.

What Finn has to go on is two instructions his dad shouted at him. Light up the house. Find the map.

The lights were easy. Every bulb in the house is burning.

The map is not going well. Two weeks in, he and his friend Emmie have worked through every map in the house, which turns out to include a guide to Norway's best pudding restaurants and a jigsaw of Ireland with County Tipperary missing. (Finn nearly choked on Tipperary as a toddler and it went in the bin.)

Meanwhile the grown-up in charge has them creeping down alleyways in full armour on the strength of a doodle on a beer mat, which Finn's mother takes one look at and identifies as directions to a chip shop.

That mix is the thing here. A boy sick with guilt, and jokes, often in the same paragraph. Darkmouth is a town of dead ends and walls topped with broken glass. It's also a town where a neighbour keeps you on the doorstep complaining about the state of things while your armour falls out of your schoolbag.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

In the prologue a man is hunted through a forest by an army of monsters, wounded and bleeding. Later an elderly woman walks into a cave and screams, and her dog trots out wearing her false teeth. Finn is also told to his face that an old prophecy has him dying. None of it is dwelt on, and the dentures are plainly a joke. Still, if your reader takes a story's deaths home with them, read the opening yourself first.

What to read next

For a child happy with all that, this is a series to do in order, so hunt out the first Darkmouth book before this one. Finn is twelve, badly out of his depth, and chasing a Minotaur through his own town in a suit of armour he made himself.