The Last Kids on Earth and the Skeleton Road

Max Brallier's Last Kids on Earth - The Skeleton Road is a monster-apocalypse comedy for 9 year olds about the day four friends finally leave the only safe place they have.

What happens

Jack Sullivan can command zombies now, which he is treating exactly the way you'd expect. He has built an elimination course in an old laser tag centre and is putting twelve of them through it to pick his squad. He calls them the Decomposing Dozen.

Then a few hundred skeleton soldiers march into the car park, armed with bone swords and monster-tooth hammers.

They smash apart beautifully. And then they pull themselves back together, because there are vines threaded through them like tangled wires, and the vines are what's really in charge.

Which is the moment everyone works out that sitting tight in Wakefield has stopped being an option.

The plot that follows is a road trip. A monster warrior called Skaelka rides home battered and hands them a gold arcade token with a town name on it. That town is halfway across the country. So they load up a motorhome, a trailer for the zombies, and go.

The best thing in the book isn't a fight. It's Dirk's house. None of them have ever been, because Dirk never mentioned he had one. There's unopened post on the mantelpiece and a map on the wall that says DIRK AND DAD'S ULTIMATE ROAD TRIP, stuck full of pins for stops they never got round to. His friends work out, without saying so, that they're going to drive it for him.

Jack narrates at about a hundred miles an hour and cracks jokes through everything, so it matters when he goes quiet. There's a chapter where he sits by a rock that a friend is buried under and talks to it, because talking to a rock helps and he knows how odd that sounds.

The monsters are pure slapstick. Skeletons come apart like Lego and put themselves back together, and the nastiest moment in the book is Skaelka calmly sawing a spike off her own tail to give away, which is played entirely for laughs. The goodbyes are the part that will actually get your reader, especially the one with the big monster he's been riding since the start.

One warning about where to begin. This sits a long way into the series. Jack recaps the plot in chapter one and you'll follow it fine, but a friend has already died and a pet has already become family, and none of that weighs anything if you arrive here.

What to read next

So the very first Last Kids on Earth book is the place to start. Jack is alone in a tree house forty-two days after the world ends, and he hasn't found any of these people yet.