Groosham Grange

About the Groosham Grange series

When perpetual troublemaker David Eliot is expelled from every school his parents try, they seize on the strange, out-of-the-blue offer of a place at Groosham Grange, a remote boarding school on an island off the English coast. David is relieved, and then increasingly unsettled, to discover the school has accepted him with total certainty he'll fit in -- and that its staff, curriculum and students are all a little more sinister than any ordinary prep school's. What starts as culture-shock comedy about an outsider surviving boarding-school politics tips quickly into something stranger: Groosham Grange isn't hiding its oddities so much as training its students in them, and David's outsider instincts put him on a collision course with what the school actually wants him for.

Return to Groosham Grange -- first published as The Unholy Grail before being retitled to link it explicitly to its predecessor -- picks up with David drawn back to the island for the school holidays, where a new, more overt threat targets the school and its unusual community directly. Horowitz keeps the same blend of black comedy and genuine menace that made the first book work, but raises the stakes from David quietly discovering the school's secrets to actively having to defend it. Written early in Horowitz's career, well before Alex Rider made him a household name in children's fiction, the duology already shows his knack for keeping young readers laughing right up until the moment he turns the screw.