House of Secrets – Clash of the Worlds

Chris Columbus's House of Secrets, Clash of the Worlds, is a big loud fantasy for 9 year olds about three children whose family is broke and whose imaginary problems have started turning up in real life.

What happens

The Walkers are standing on a beach at night trying to coax a fifty-storey giant out of San Francisco Bay. He's their friend. He came out of a book.

That's the level this one starts at, and it doesn't slow down. By the end of the first night Cordelia has dreamed she is somebody else entirely, Brendan has watched a news report about a monster shot dead in a town seven miles away, and both of them have worked out that the wall between the made-up world and this one is coming apart.

Underneath the monsters, though, it's a book about a family that has lost everything. The big house is gone. Dad gambled away the whole fortune and is going into treatment. Mum starts on the shoe counter at a department store. The children are moving back to their old schools, where everyone will ask why.

Brendan says out loud that facing his old classmates frightens him more than the pirates did, and that's the line that made me like him. The jokes are constant and about half of them are terrible, which is the point. He knows it. His sisters tell him so.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing before you start, because this is stronger meat than the cover suggests. A zombie kills a security guard on the page, off in the shadows but very clearly, and then bites Brendan on the arm. A news clip shows a deputy grinning next to a creature he has just shot in the head. A man sleeping rough grabs an eight-year-old by the collar. The children set fire to a bin to cook four hundred pounds of raw meat.

None of it is dwelt on and all of it is played at speed, but a nine-year-old who is easily spooked will feel it. A child who already reads horror-flavoured adventures and wants the volume turned up will be delighted.

The other thing to say plainly is that this isn't the first book. The children have been into the book world twice before, old enemies get referred to as though you were there, and the opening chapter tells you how two of them ended up. Your reader will follow it perfectly well. They just won't get those earlier surprises back.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who loves the idea of made-up characters escaping into the real world, The Land of Stories, Worlds Collide, does the same trick with fairy tales. It's the last of its own series, and in it every character from those stories, the good and the bad, is loose on our side of the page.