The Hunted

Charlie Higson's The Hunted is a horror story for 11 year olds about a girl stranded in the countryside with the strangest grown-up she's ever met.

What happens

Ella left the Natural History Museum with a few friends, hoping for a safer life away from London. It went wrong on the very first night. Now she's living in a barn on a farm ringed with tripwires and traps, and she's got no idea what her rescuer wants.

His face is so badly torn up that she calls him Face-Ache. She's sure he's one of the sick grown-ups who hunt children. But he isn't trying to eat her. He feeds her a cold potato and porridge (and eggs from a barn full of hundreds of chickens).

Can a sick grown-up really be on her side? Ella keeps waiting for the catch, and so will your reader.

Back at the museum, a boy called Ed has news Ella badly needs to hear. He's trying to get a team together to go after her. Hardly anyone wants to come, and Achilleus is very rude about it.

It's such an odd friendship and that's what makes the book. Ella chatters at him all the time. She sings a silly teasing song at him and tells him he's ugly. He just carries on quietly looking after her. It's funny and sad and creepy all at once.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

It's book six in The Enemy series and it's very dark. The opening pages are told by a sick man who bites a boy's neck, drinks his blood, then snaps his neck and throws him to the others. In the second chapter Ella's young friend Monkey-Boy has been bitten and badly hurt, and she sees his insides before he dies. Later a woman is caught on one of Face-Ache's spiked traps, he finishes her off with a knife, and a pack of dogs feeds on her body.

There's swearing too, though it's the gore that will stop some readers.

If your reader is squeamish, or hasn't read any horror yet, this really isn't the place to start. If they've been gripped by the earlier books, they'll want to know what happens to Ella. And it leans on what's gone before, so anyone new to the series is better off starting with The Enemy.

What to read next

If they're after more Charlie Higson while they're waiting, try SilverFin. James Bond is a new boy at Eton in it, and the opening has dead animals strung up on a fence by a Scottish loch as a warning (not so different from Face-Ache's farm).