Story corner

Sea Monster by Chris Wormell (Cape, 10.99)

Looking at this book's cover, you might at first just see an ordinary coastline, a beach with a boy and his inquisitive dog. Look closer and you may notice a gaunt spindly hand, webbed, curled around a rock in the foreground, camouflaged. Then on the first inside page we are confronted with it - the sea monster. 'Barnacles and limpets clung to his scaly skin and seaweed grew from every wrinkle.'

What the reader doesn't know yet is whether this sea monster with the glowing green eyes is friend or foe, and in the carefully paced and nail-biting pages that follow, we find out. The boy loses his toy boat in the swirling, incoming tide, and when he swims after it we fear for his life. Here the illustration shows a chilling picture of the boy in the water, seen from below, and we wonder whether he is drowning. Then on the following pages this overwhelming sea is exchanged for a startlingly sheer cliff with a tiny cottage set on the top. An old fisherman lives here, and though it is many years since he's climbed down the steep cliff steps, and since he's rowed his little wooden boat, this is just what he does now. He finds the boy sheltering on a rock that is 'covered with barnacles and limpets, and with seaweed growing from every crack'. It's the sea monster.