âDon't panic. That's the first rule of survival. Never panic.â
Simple enough â until your school trip turns into a waking nightmare.
After rescuing a book from the river, eleven-year-old Ollie discovers an unsettling ghost story about the sinister Smiling Man, a fiendish trickster whoâll grant any wish â for a price. Creepy, but itâs just a story ...
But when Ollie finds graves bearing the charactersâ names on a school trip to a farm, that story begins to feel terrifyingly real. And then the bus breaks down on the way home. And darkness starts to fall. And the scarecrows are watching. But itâs the bus driver who sends Ollie and her friends, Coco and Brian, scrambling into the woods: âBest get moving,â he said, ominously. âAt nightfall theyâll come for the rest of you.â
As they work to unravel a hundred-year-old mystery and save their classmates from the Smiling Man, theyâll need quick thinking and even quicker feet if theyâre going to survive.
Full of slow-burning tension, gorgeously atmospheric writing and fantastically realised characters, this is quality-commercial fiction at its best: brilliant storytelling that feels accessible both in execution and packaging.