Knights vs Dinosaurs

Knights vs Dinosaurs by Matt Phelan is an adventure for 8 year olds that starts because a knight told a whopping great lie at dinner.

What happens

Sir Erec announces he has slain forty dragons. Four would have been more believable. Worse, he says it in front of Merlin, the one person at the Round Table clever enough to know there aren't any dragons.

So Merlin lays a trap. There is, he mentions, a cave. And in this cave lives the most fearsome creature of all. The Terrible Lizard.

Four knights ride out at first light. Erec, who is mostly bluster. Hector, who is suspiciously clean for a man with so many adventures behind him. Bors, who believes in Might Makes Right and brings a squire loaded with swords, a mace, a bludgeon, a lance, several knives and a few rocks. And the Black Knight, who has never said a word to anybody.

The cave contains a book. Hector opens it. The torches blow out. And when they get back outside there's a tree where no tree was, and something very large is bearing down on Sir Hector.

Terrible Lizard, as Merlin knew perfectly well, is what the word dinosaur means.

The jokes are dry and they land. These knights are hopeless in exactly the ways knights would be, competitive about who has the best coat-of-arms, anxious about how the minstrels will spell their names, thinking of witty retorts several hours too late. Then the fighting starts and it moves fast.

Early on the Black Knight takes the helmet off, and the Black Knight is a woman. Magdalena, daughter of Robert the Blacksmith, swinging a sword since she was four. She kept quiet about it, she says, because she simply didn't wish to deal with the stupidity of other knights. Bors's put-upon squire Mel turns out to be a girl as well. Neither of these is turned into a lesson, which is precisely why it works.

A word on the violence. It is knights against dinosaurs, so people get flung into trees, snapped at, knocked flat like bowling pins and there's blood spat onto the ground. It's cartoonish rather than grim, much closer to a good film fight than to anything upsetting. It is, though, more or less constant once it starts.

What to read next

If they enjoy a knight who thinks considerably more of himself than the evidence supports, try the World's Worst Knight. Sir Roderick isn't even a knight yet. He's a squire keeping a diary of his heroic deeds, and today's heroic deed was scrubbing pigeon mess off a castle wall.