The Fallen

The Fallen by Charlie Higson is a horror novel for 11 year olds, set in a London where every grown-up has turned into something that hunts children.

What happens

Maxie's crew have just fought their way out of the palace, and for about half an hour it feels brilliant. They own the streets. They have sent a pack of grown-ups running. Somebody starts singing.

Then they reach the Natural History Museum, where a girl called Brooke has promised them somewhere safe, and the gatehouse is empty and the big doors are already standing open.

Inside, a handful of kids are backed up against the diplodocus skeleton with a mob closing in on them and bodies on the floor.

These grown-ups are not the street-hard ones Maxie knows from Holloway. They are thin and feeble, grey-skinned, eaten away with sores. There are simply a lot of them, and they have come up from somewhere downstairs, past doors that were supposed to be locked.

What Higson does brilliantly is the group. Everybody has a job and a place. Lewis on the left flank, Big Mick on the right, Ollie at the back with his slingshot and the brains of the escape plan, Achilleus out in front barely upright with one side of his head taped. The little ones in the middle, fussing over a puppy called Godzilla. You always know where everyone is, which makes it much worse when one of them stops being there.

Maxie is why it all holds together. She can run a fight, and she is also quietly scared of the dinosaur skeletons, because she came to this museum at about four with her mum and dad and had nightmares for weeks.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is proper horror and it softens nothing. The adults have rotted and they eat children. The children fight back with spears and clubs and kill without a pause. Bodies get described. A girl in the opening chapter has been so badly cut up that her face is scabs and yellow and purple bruising, and nobody wants to look under her bandage. It is grim by design.

If your child reads Higson for exactly this, the fear and the tactics and the body count, this is what they came for. If they are the sort who takes a book to bed and then lies there listening to the house, leave this one on the shelf a while longer.

One more thing. It lands well into the series and it assumes plenty. The first pages take it as read that you know who David is, what happened at the palace and who Maxie has already lost.

What to read next

The Enemy is where all of this began, in a supermarket car park in north London, with Maxie's group under siege and a boy called Small Sam carried off over a wall in a sack.