Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist and Marlaine Delargy

'The new Stephen King. Don't miss it' The Times

He found her as a baby, abandoned in the forest. He saved her life. With her first breath - a perfect, musical note - he realised she was no ordinary child.

It was for her own protection that he hid her from the authorities. Was it his fault, what she turned into? Or was that why she was left for dead in the first place?

The girl who became a little star. Who became, with her extraordinary powers, the most terrifying thing imaginable.

In John Ajvide Lindqvist's fourth masterpiece, he ratchets up the tension until the story reaches its blood-chilling conclusion. In doing so, he confirms his place as the undisputed new king of horror.

One book critic said that Lindqvist is “Scandanavia's answer to Stephen King.” I'd say that's true. His writing is a lot like King's, for better or worse.

The bad: The book is overly long and poorly paced. It takes way too long for any major plot progression and way too long for the two protagonists/villains to meet each other. The prose is also a bit sloppy, with plenty of cliches and lazy descriptions (though maybe that's the fault of the translation).

The good: The characters of Theres and Theresa are horrifying. While the book isn't scary per se, their characters are frightening, in part because they're so evil and in part because Lindqvist did a great job of making you believe how they could become that way.

The book is shocking in many ways, not just in the scenes of brutal violence but also in scenes of bullying, online interactions, the way Theresa pulls away from her friends and family as she slowly becomes more sociopathic.

The book is told from many points of view, but the scenes of violence are normally told from the POV of the perpetrator of the violence. That means we're deprived of one kind of suspense and tension (fearing for the victim and hoping they can escape) and instead are given a different kind (horrified by how depraved and evil the children are).

That's why I say it's not a “scary” book. But it is an interesting one. And in the creepy-children subgenre of horror, children don't get much creepier than this.

Started out great but soon spiralled down. Really bad second half.

Well, that was weird.....compelling for the most part.....but weird. Murder and violence aside, Lindqvist paints a vivid portrait of the adolescent outsider.