Pandaemonium

Christopher Brookmyre’s Pandaemonium sends the senior pupils of St Peter’s High School on retreat after the murder of a classmate. While they grieve, flirt, drink and test every boundary available, a nearby military experiment has gone catastrophically wrong and something resembling Hell is breaking loose.

What I enjoyed most was the collision between teenage chaos and full-scale supernatural horror. Brookmyre gives the pupils enough humour, fear and awkwardness to make them feel like real young people rather than disposable victims. Their arguments about faith, science and morality become much more urgent once survival is no longer theoretical.

Fast, gruesome and darkly funny, this is a horror novel with the pace of an action thriller and more intelligence than its carnage initially suggests. Beneath the demons and violence sits a sharp story about grief, belief and what people reveal when every comforting explanation fails.