The Sacrifice

Charlie Higson's The Sacrifice is a horror story for 11 year olds about children holding the Tower of London against sick and hungry adults, under laws they wrote themselves.

What happens

Small Sam is not dead. Everyone he loves thinks he is. He was snatched from a supermarket car park and his sister and his friends assume the grown-ups ate him.

Instead he is walking across the grounds of the Tower of London with a strange boy called The Kid, and he cannot quite believe it. Sam has always loved knights and castles. Now he lives in one, and some of the other children wear armour.

A boy called Ed found the two of them on the road and decided they were his responsibility.

Sam's first proper look at his new home is a trial.

The castle is run by General Jordan Hordern, a boy in glasses mended with sticking plasters who can control more than a hundred children without raising his voice. He also can't see properly any more, which nobody knows and he intends to keep that way.

A boy has been caught taking tins of peaches from the stores.

Jordan is calm about it. He explains that without food they all die, so stealing food is as serious as murder. Then he says the sentence is death, and a chopping block from one of the museum displays is carried out onto the green.

What makes this so gripping is that the sick adults are almost the ordinary part. The real dread comes from the children and the rules they have written for each other. Jordan is frightening precisely because he is fair, patient and completely certain.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

A boy is tried and sentenced to death by other children for stealing tinned fruit, and it happens in the first two chapters, so it is not a late twist you can steer around. He sobs, begs, is pinned to the floor and is dragged out with his hands tied. The story also takes it as read that diseased adults hunt and eat small children.

There's swearing too, and the kind of frank cruelty children use on each other.

For a reader who already reads horror and wants something with real weight behind it, this is very good indeed. For a child who is still working out what they can handle at night, leave it a year.

What to read next

Sam's story starts in The Enemy, which opens in that same car park on a sunny afternoon, with the little kids playing outside when they shouldn't be.