Horizon – Apex Predator

M T Anderson's Horizon - Apex Predator is a survival adventure for 10 year olds about a group of children crossing a sea in a world that keeps trying to eat them.

What happens

Molly is tired. Not sleepy tired. Tired of a week and a half of never once being able to stop watching for the next thing that wants to kill her.

She's walking through a blue forest with Hank and Anna, looking for the shore of an inland sea. The trees look like broccoli. Something has worn a wide path through the undergrowth, and Anna, who cannot help herself, points out that every ecosystem has an apex predator and it is always bigger than the thing that made the path.

A plane full of children came down here. They climbed out expecting the Arctic and found jungle. Since then they've been walking towards a city of spires they saw on a strange floating map, because that's where the answers are supposed to be.

The world itself is the best thing in the book. Vegetables that explode to scatter their seeds and fire one into Molly's cheek. Birds with beaks like knives. Sand that swallows people. A twenty foot thing with no head at all that rises out of a beach where it has been digging.

The chase is properly frightening. You get the noise, then the silence, then the worst bit, which is realising the thing has stopped moving and is waiting.

There's real thinking in it too. Anna reads the biome. Javi works out from a rotted wooden statue that this place once had a civilisation, which means it isn't another planet, which means something much worse about when they are.

This one is darker than the jacket suggests, and you should know that going in. Children have already died before page one and the survivors talk about it. Molly was bitten by something and is quietly changing into something that isn't human, and she hasn't told anybody. Another child is further along, lying in the bushes with spiked skin and one wet red eye, saying the same broken sentence over and over. A child who reads for jeopardy will love it. A child who takes body horror to bed will not.

One practical thing. This isn't the first book. It opens mid-journey with a cast of about ten who already have history, and the earlier ones aren't in the library yet, so your reader is starting a few chapters in.

What to read next

Another plane, another jungle, and a cleaner place to begin. The Explorer drops four children into the Amazon when their pilot collapses at the controls, and everything after that is them working out how to eat.