The Demon Headmaster and the Prime Minister’s Brain

Gillian Cross's The Demon Headmaster and the Prime Minister's Brain is a creepy school-holiday thriller for 8 year olds about a computer game nobody can stop watching.

What happens

It's the summer holidays, and the members of the secret society SPLAT are spending a week at the school's Computer Club. Dinah is delighted, because she could happily spend all day writing programs. Ingrid is furious, because it's the holidays.

Then a new game arrives. It's called Octopus Dare, and whoever beats it gets a shot at being named Junior Computer Brain of the Year. Soon a hundred children are sitting cross-legged in neat rows in the hall, staring at one screen, waiting for the octopus. Only Harvey and Ingrid think something is very wrong.

Dinah doesn't care about games. But once she sees the puzzle, she can't stop either. The tentacles twist and loop across the screen and watching them makes her feel dreamy and excited at the same time.

Lloyd, Harvey and Dinah have already had one run-in with the Demon Headmaster, and they remember what his school felt like. The blank walls. The quiet children moving like robots. So when the man on the competition poster is tall and thin, with thick pebbly glasses, your reader will have a pretty good idea who's behind it.

The scary thing here isn't a monster. It's how quiet everyone goes. A whole hall of children who can't look away from a screen. Sound familiar? It's a very unsettling picture, and it might spark a chat at home about the games that are hard to put down.

Lloyd's bossiness and Ian's jokes stop it from getting too dark (and Ingrid's cross-eyed faces at the poster help). Dinah is a great heroine too. She's the cleverest person in any room, and she'd much rather nobody noticed.

It's creepy rather than gory, and the fear is all about being controlled, not being hurt. If your reader enjoys that shivery feeling of knowing more than the characters do, they'll race through it.

What to read next

If they haven't met him yet, the first Demon Headmaster book is where Dinah comes to live with the Hunters and starts at his school.