The Dead End

Mimi McCoy's The Dead End is a creepy haunted-house story for 9 year olds about a girl who's frightened of almost everything, stuck for the summer in the spookiest house she's ever seen.

What happens

Casey Slater is twelve and lives in a flat in Manhattan. She takes the stairs because lift cables can snap. She never swallows her gum. She's pretty sure most things in the world could kill you if you gave them the chance.

So she's horrified when her parents announce they've bought an old farmhouse in New Hampshire, and they're all spending the whole summer there fixing it up. Goodbye to every plan she'd made with Jillian, her best friend. And the lane to the house has a sign on it that says DEAD END (of course it does).

Strange things start the minute they arrive. Something rolls across the floor of an empty bedroom. GET OUT is written in the dust on a mirror, and it's gone by the time Dad comes to look.

The candles keep blowing out at dinner. The van keys turn up behind the toilet. An old man in the village shop stares at Casey and drops his milk.

It's a proper page-turner, and Casey is good company because she's funny even when she's terrified. She takes one look at the ancient kitchen stove and asks if you're supposed to cook on it or drive it. Her parents are so busy with paint colours and antique trunks that they don't notice she's scared stiff. That's a feeling plenty of children will recognise!

The early chapters build slowly, with little shivers rather than big shocks. There's a nosy boy from down the lane too, who Casey is definitely not interested in (probably).

It's worth knowing how it begins. On the first page Casey is telling her friend about a chain email, a spooky tale of a girl pushed into a sewer and killed, and a boy found dead because he didn't forward it. Her friend says it's obviously made up and it's only a story being told, but it's a grim way in for a younger reader. In the early chapters the house itself is spooky rather than gory.

If your reader likes a shiver at bedtime and can laugh at a heroine who's scared of pigeons, they'll love this.

What to read next

If they want another girl whose imagination runs away with her, try The Dollhouse: A Ghost Story. Alice is twelve too. Her parents' marriage falls apart the day before their summer holiday, and she ends up on a train with her mum to a big house in a town she's never seen.