The Demon Headmaster Takes Over

Gillian Cross's The Demon Headmaster Takes Over is a creepy thriller for 8 year olds where the grown-ups start to go very strange indeed.

What happens

Dinah, Lloyd and Harvey are moving house. On their last night in the village, soldiers arrive in the middle of the night to open up the old Research Centre. It's the place where the children's last brush with the Demon Headmaster happened, and it's been sealed up and smothered in creeper ever since.

Harvey is sure something's wrong. Lloyd tells him to stop being silly. And then Mrs Pritchett from the Post Office mentions a tall man in dark glasses she saw driving off from the back of the building...

This is a later book in the series, following on from those events at the Research Centre, so it helps to have met the Headmaster first. But you soon get the idea. He's a man with sea-green eyes who can hypnotise people with a look ("You are feeling very sleepy...").

Dinah has two new friends in this one. Claudia is a brilliant young scientist who drives a white sports car and shouts at army majors. Michael is a lonely boy whose dad is organising a huge conference about a worldwide computer "Hyperbrain". Then the conference goes on TV and the picture breaks up just as a tall figure walks on stage.

After that, things get properly spooky. Claudia suddenly looks at Dinah as if she's a stranger. Michael's friendly dad turns cold. People start wearing odd little green badges and all say the same chilling line. "Curiosity is the curse of the human brain." The phones stop working. Groups of students walk about in matching clothes without speaking.

It's creepy in a clever way rather than a gory one. The scariest thing is watching nice people turn blank, and knowing Dinah can't trust anyone.

Dinah is a fantastic heroine. She's clever, she loves knowing things and she refuses to stop asking questions (which, in this book, is the bravest thing you can do). The SPLAT gang (the Society for the Protection of Our Lives Against Them) bring plenty of silly jokes to lighten things up too.

For a reader who likes a shiver down their spine, this one's a real page-turner. It'd also be a fun way to start a chat about computers, and whether a machine could ever think.

What to read next

Start with the first Demon Headmaster book, where Dinah comes to live with the Hunters. Lloyd and Harvey are two of only five "Normals" in their whole school, and Lloyd is in no hurry to explain.