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The Demon Headmaster by Gillian Cross is a scary story for 8 year olds, and the frightening thing in it is a man in a suit who never once raises his voice.
Dinah Glass is eleven. Her parents died when she was one and she has lived in a children's home ever since. Now she is coming to live with the Hunters.
Lloyd, who is her age, has decided in advance that this is a catastrophe. His brother Harvey is more cheerful about it. Dinah arrives, shakes hands, answers every question in about four words, then goes upstairs with a book.
None of them warm to each other. That is not a small detail. It is exactly why nobody tells her anything about the school.
And the school is wrong. The children walk there without laughing or shoving. At the gates every single one of them stops and combs their hair. Nobody runs. Ever. Being a few minutes late to hand out the registers makes Harvey genuinely frightened.
Lloyd refuses to explain. He wants her to find out for herself. Which means your reader finds out alongside Dinah, and that is much the best way round.
It is properly unsettling, and it is all done with completely ordinary things. Combs. Registers. A green blazer with a white P on the pocket. Somebody standing perfectly still at an upstairs window, watching the steps. Nothing leaps out at you. It just gets quieter and more obedient until you notice you have been holding your breath.
There is plenty of comedy pulling the other way. Lloyd swears in things like purple pancakes, scarlet sausages and orange onions with silver skins, which is very funny and tells you exactly how wound up he is.
Your reader does not need to like blood and monsters to enjoy this. The threat here is control, and it works on your nerves rather than by making you jump.
One more thing. Dinah's background is set out in chapter two and it is plain. Both her parents died when she was a baby and she grew up in a children's home. That is established before the story starts rather than a later turn, and it is told briskly, but it may be a lot for a child who has been thinking about that sort of thing.
It was also written in the 1980s, so there is not a mobile phone in sight, which mostly works in its favour.
If it gets under their skin, The Demon Headmaster Strikes Again has the same three children moved to a new village where everybody repeats the same odd phrases and there is a biogenetic research centre just down the road.
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