The Dark Flight Down

Marcus Sedgwick's The Dark Flight Down is a cold, gothic thriller for 11 year olds about a boy with nobody left and an emperor who has decided never to die.

What happens

This is the second book about Boy, and it opens a few days after the first one finishes. Reading them in this order gives the first one away, so it is worth checking which your reader has.

The City has frozen solid. Snow falls every night and covers the filth, and Boy sits at a window counting flakes because it is easier than thinking.

The magician who raised him is gone. Willow, his one friend, has been taken away and put to work by Boy's new master, Kepler, who will not say where.

Kepler feeds him, does not shout at him and does not beat him. He was also no friend at all to the man Boy is grieving, whatever he claimed, and he wants Boy for something he refuses to explain.

Meanwhile, in the palace, Emperor Frederick the Third has worked out that he is going to die one day and has ordered his right hand, Maxim, to arrange otherwise. Maxim is exhausted, frightened and has run out of flattering answers.

Sedgwick writes cold better than almost anyone. You feel the snow in your boots, the damp in the tavern, the ache of a frozen graveyard. The sentences are short and the chapters are shorter, so it moves quickly even though very little of it is cheerful.

The best scene in the opening is a funeral that turns into a wake. The theatre crowd play a drinking game with a saucer of lit spirits and burning raisins, and while grown men fall off their chairs, Boy and Willow sit in the corner and quietly plan to run away together.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

A man has been murdered with what the Watch call excessive force and considerable blood loss, and whoever did it is still out there. The emperor mimes cutting his servant's throat. Adults get very drunk and it is played for laughs. And Boy is an orphan being steered by a man who means him harm, which the book never softens.

This is unsettling rather than scary-funny, and it suits a confident reader who likes the lights turned down.

What to read next

Start with The Book of Dead Days instead, which is also in the library. It opens with Boy folded inside a cabinet on a theatre stage, legs going numb, waiting for a thump on the lid to tell him it is his turn.