The Dead

The Dead by Charlie Higson is a zombie horror story for 11 year olds, and it opens with a boy being told to hit his English teacher with a cricket bat.

What happens

A disease has been through every adult. The ones who did not die are still up and walking, and they are hungry, and what they are hungry for is children.

Jack is stuck at Rowhurst, his school, with his best mate Ed. The electricity went off three weeks ago. They have spent two nights running holding the teachers off the windows and they are down to rationed water.

Mr Hewitt is coming through the glass. He used to be the young popular one who talked to the boys about films and games because he honestly liked the same things they did. When the sickness started he looked after everybody. He was a hero.

Now his eyes are wide, his tongue is out, and Jack's arm is too tired to lift the bat.

So he throws it to Ed.

That is chapter one and it is the whole book in miniature. Ed is the golden boy, the face on the front of the school prospectus, and he cannot make himself hit anyone. Jack has a birthmark he has been self conscious about all his life and has just worked out that it does not even make the top hundred things wrong with the world.

There is no let up in it. Short sentences, one crisis straight into the next, and no comfortable distance from any of it. The two boys are properly good to each other, which is what makes the rest bearable. Jack hugs Ed in the corridor afterwards and tells him it is all right.

Now the warning, and it is a big one. The publisher describes this series as horror for teens, which is well above the shelf it is sitting on here. Inside the first few pages a teacher is disembowelled on the common room carpet and tries to scoop himself back together. A boy is sick. There is talk of packs of adults pulling a body apart and eating it. The language is rough. And the fear is not cartoon fear, because the monsters are people these children liked a fortnight ago.

For a confident reader who eats horror for breakfast, this will grip them completely. If yours is at the younger end of the shelf, or frightens easily, read chapter one yourself before you decide.

What to read next

For a reader who is up to it, The Enemy covers the same ground. Maxie and a gang of children are holed up in a supermarket, and it starts with the smallest of them being carried out of the car park in a sack.