Read Darkmouth free in the Little Reads app.
Darkmouth by Shane Hegarty is a monster-hunting story for 9 year olds, and the boy expected to save the world is not much good at it yet.
Darkmouth is a perfectly nice town. There's an ice-cream shop on the harbour, benches along the strand, climbing frames for the kids. It's just also the last place on earth where monsters still come through.
They aren't monsters, strictly speaking. They're Legends. They shared the world with people once, then turned on them, and the war has been going for centuries. Everywhere else it has quietly fizzled out. Not here.
Finn is twelve. His family has held the job for generations. He built his own fighting suit and it's far too big, because his parents told him to leave room to grow into it. It rattles when he runs. The book says it sounds like a bag of forks falling downstairs, which tells you how well the stealth is going.
We meet him running away from a Minotaur. Frankly, fair enough.
What makes Finn worth following is that he is scared the entire time and does it anyway. He keeps pressing the radio button in his helmet and asking for his dad. He keeps getting static.
His dad turns up eventually, drops the Minotaur in one shot and makes a joke about it. He's the famous one. He tells Finn he did well, a little loose in parts, and that most twelve-year-olds would die for a go at this.
That's the ache running underneath all the running and shooting. Finn is being praised and quietly let down in the same breath, and he notices.
The jokes come thick and fast and the chase barely stops for air. If you've got a reader who wants funny and frightening at the same time, this does both at once rather than taking turns.
The monsters are described properly. The Minotaur gets a full paragraph of slobber, chipped tusks and skin cracked like baked clay, and the book cheerfully tells you how many times the word gouge is going through its head. There's graffiti on a wall in town showing a snake swallowing a child. People have been eaten in Darkmouth. Just not lately.
None of it is gory for the sake of it and the tone stays comic throughout. If your reader enjoys being scared on purpose, this is exactly the right kind of scared. If monsters follow them to bed, give it another year.
If Finn wins your reader over, Darkmouth - Worlds Explode is waiting for them in the app. That one takes him across to the Infested Side, the place all the Legends come from, which the first book only ever describes from a safe distance.
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