Imogen Russell Williams

Humour and horror for children

Guillermo del Toro’s Trollhunters and Katherine Rundell’s The Wolf Wilder are properly scary — and sometimes wickedly funny

issue 12 September 2015

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.

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