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The Enemy by Charlie Higson is a survival horror story for 11 year olds set in a London where every adult got sick and the children are on their own.
It opens with Small Sam playing in a supermarket car park with the little ones. They aren't supposed to be outside without a guard, but it was sunny and they were bored indoors.
The grown-ups come over the wall. A woman in a filthy tracksuit, bent double and running fast with her arms held wide like claws. Two men closing in from either side. No shouting and no screaming, just a boy cornered and then gone, in a sack.
Maxie was on the roof. She was supposed to be watching.
That is the shape of the book. A group of children holed up in a building, all of them hungry, going outside only in fours. One to lead, two for the sides, one to watch the back. Arran runs things with Maxie. Achilleus is the fighter. Ollie is small, quiet and deadly with a slingshot. Freak and Deke know every alley in north London because they used to tag them.
Then word starts going round about somewhere safe.
What makes it work is how ordinary all this has become to them. A split-open body in the road is barely worth stopping for. Maxie can list the children they have lost. Josh keeps announcing that nothing scares him, which is the giveaway.
The frightening parts are physical. A wall to get over. A pack of dogs working out whether you are worth the effort. Everyone hungry, all the time.
Be clear-eyed about what this is, though. Children die in it, and the book says so plainly in the first chapter rather than saving it up. The sick adults are described closely, with blackened skin splitting apart and pus running out when a body is prodded with a shoe. A pack of dogs attacks and the children kill several of them on the page, with a spear and a steel ball.
None of it is there for shock. It is there so you believe the stakes. But a squeamish reader, or one who worries about an adult at home, may be happier waiting a year.
This is the American edition too, so expect parking lot, sidewalk and soccer all the way through.
For a reader who wants to stay in this world, The Dead follows a completely different set of children. It starts in a school, with a boy gripping a cricket bat and unable to bring himself to swing it at his English teacher.
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