Facing the Demon Headmaster

Gillian Cross's Facing the Demon Headmaster is a scary adventure for 8 year olds about a DJ in an electronic mask and a girl who can't stop asking questions.

What happens

Dinah and her friends call themselves SPLAT, the Society for the Protection of our Lives Against Them. They've been up against the Headmaster before. This time it all starts on a night out.

A club called Purple has swept the country. Everyone dresses in their oldest clothes, piles on the make-up and turns up with that week's secret item. This week it's bananas (the supermarket sells out and the shoppers are NOT happy). And on stage is DJ Pardoman, whose face keeps changing. One minute it's Elvis, the next it's a baby, then the Prime Minister.

It's great fun to read and properly odd at the same time. Mandy's cousin Ellie has a dead-white face and hardly moves her mouth when she talks. Huge men in purple tracksuits hurl anyone who pushes right back over the crowd. At the end of the night the car park turns into a banana-skin ice rink.

Then a message appears on the club's shutter. Unmask DJ Pardoman! Whoever finds out most about him gets to lift off his mask. But why would a DJ who's famous for being a mystery want to be unmasked? Dinah's the one who can't let that go.

While she's searching online, she finds something that has nothing to do with the DJ. It's a newspaper photo of a man who looks exactly like her dad. Her parents died in a car accident when she was a baby, so that's impossible. Isn't it?

That's the part that really pulls you in. Dinah is clever and prickly and very private. She'd rather go off alone than tell her friends, and you'll be willing her not to.

It's worth saying that Dinah's lost parents are backstory rather than something that happens in the book, but her hope about her dad is at the centre of it. A child who's thinking about a lost parent might find that a lot. The club scenes also feel a little older than this shelf (an Under Eighteens night, lipstick and nail varnish), though it's mostly dancing and banana skins.

What to read next

If they're new to Dinah and SPLAT, the first Demon Headmaster book is in the library too. Lloyd and Harvey are dreading a girl their age coming to live with them, and sure she'll turn out to be one of the goody-goodies at their very strange school.