Will Wilder 1 – The Relic of Perilous Falls

Raymond Arroyo's The Relic of Perilous Falls is a supernatural adventure for 9 year olds about a boy who has been seeing things out of the corner of his eye since he was four.

What happens

Will Wilder is twelve, nearly five feet tall, and has just been told he's too big for the donkey ride at his little brother's birthday party.

That should be the end of it. Will has money riding on it, though, so he does a deal with Leo instead. Leo gets to be the first human fired out of the homemade catapult. Will gets the donkey.

You can probably see where this is going.

The donkey bucks, a table goes over, Aunt Freda lands flat on her back in the icing, and Leo sails into a fence and breaks his arm. Will splits his hand open on the catapult lever. Then the shadow he keeps half seeing stands up in the garden and stretches across the whole lawn in bright sunshine, and nobody else can see it.

Who exactly do you tell about that? His mum has already taken him to the eye doctor twice (nothing wrong with his eyes, he just needs more sleep).

What Will doesn't know is that his great-aunt Lucille runs the family museum above the town and keeps knives, spears and a crossbow in a clearing behind her house. She has a prophecy locked in a book with seven claw-shaped locks. It says a Wilder boy will come riding on a donkey, and his blood will spill, and the beasts will rise.

That same afternoon a riverboat capsizes on the Perilous River for no reason anyone can explain, and a fisherman doesn't come home.

The family chaos and the creeping dread sit right next to each other, and it moves fast. If your reader likes that mix, this is very much their thing.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

A young soldier picks through bombed Italy in 1943, past bodies in the street, to lift a saint's bones out of a wrecked church. A Nazi officer meets him there, and the officer turns out to have died days ago, with something else wearing him. It's a strong start and a genuinely frightening one, and it sets the tone for the demons that follow.

What to read next

For another boy who is the only one who can see them, try Johnny and the Dead. Pratchett's is much funnier and far less grim, and the dead of Johnny's local cemetery need his help because the council wants to sell the place.