Humour and horror for children

In the Californian town of San Bernadino, children are going missing; smiling faces grace a gallery of milk cartons. One September evening in 1969, Jim Sturges’s brother Jack rides under a bridge and never comes out. All that’s left is his Sportcrest bike, its front wheel spinning.

Forty-five years later, 15-year-old Jim Junior lives in a state of reluctant siege. Traumatised by loss, his father has armour-clad their home, calling the cops if Jim gets home seconds after sunset. Jim has other problems, too; he and his friend Tub have caught the eye of Steve Jorgensen-Warner, the school bully. And now something nasty seems to be emerging from the sewers. To prevent another milk-carton epidemic, Jim must conquer terror, disgust and his father’s imprisoning fear, and accept his unenviable destiny. Trolls, it turns out, are real, hungry and all around, especially in the plumbing. And Jim is a Trollhunter.

The opening of Guillermo del Toro’s young-adult debut reads like an homage to Stephen King’s It, and there’s a compelling, King-like balance of the gory and the mundane throughout. This is, in every sense, a meaty book; the idea of human-as-comestible is lingered over in a way that might not surprise, considering del Toro’s grisly cinematic oeuvre and co-author Daniel Kraus’s horror pedigree. But Trollhunters is also wickedly funny, splendidly subversive and full of the carefully observed, painful preoccupations of adolescence. As Jim grows into his unwanted birthright, he navigates relationships of Möbius Strip-complexity, reconciling past with present to face the future head-on — familiar territory for young-adult novels, handled here with originality, intelligence and panache.

Meticulously visual, the prose directs the reader’s gaze. Claire, Jim’s exotic Scottish crush (complete with unlikely slang vocabulary), is ‘a vision of Juliet seen through a steampunk lens… dual ponytails intertwined to slap at her back like the supply hoses of an oxygen mask’.