A brilliant book - Rated 
I thought that this was a brilliant book from a brilliant author. Although Gillian Cross is brilliant, I think that she is under rated. This book is really good and isn't too hard to read.
The Demon Headmaster - Rated
Harvey and Lloyd are two brothers whose parents foster a girl called Dinah. When they find out about this they flip! When Dinah arrives she is so excited about going to school the next day. However, when she arrives at school she is surprised to see all the other pupils are so well behaved and she can't figure out why. Then, when she goes to assembly she figures out that the headmaster hypnotises people!!! Harvey, Lloyd and some other children who are unable to be hypnotised form a group to find out how and why the headmaster does it.
One day the headmaster tells the children that they are going to be on The Eddy Hair TV Show. Harvey, Lloyd and Dinah don't understand why he wants to do this until they realise that at the end of the show, the winning team's headmaster gets one minute to talk to the nation. The children figure out he's going to try to hypnotise the whole nation. Will he succeed? Read the book to find out.
This is a great book and I would recommend it to anyone who likes scary stories or stories about school.
A pretty good pre-teen kids story - tense & interesting rather than scary - Rated 
First published in 1982, this book reads a bit like a cross between Enid Blyton's secret seven and the My parents are aliens TV series, except that here the very odd characters are at school rather than at home. Dinah has just moved to a new foster home where the incumbent boys (particularly older brother Lloyd) are very suspicious of her. Perhaps with good reason, as from the very first day at her new school, Dinah can see that something is horribly wrong. All the schoolchildren are just too perfectly behaved, and her free-thinking step-brothers are being excluded and treated as trouble-makers. And before long, the Headmaster asks to see Dinah....
My son (10) is really enjoying me reading this book to him at bedtime (at 160 pages it is taking a while). We started off with the Puffin edition and then bought this edition when the library recalled it. We were disappointed that, unlike the Puffin version, this book has no illustrations (and the front cover is a bit bland compared to the traditional cover image of the Demon Headmasters face - but then in a way the old cover gave away a lot of the plot). But the story reads well enough without line drawings, and we have now bought all the other five books in this series : The Demon Headmaster and the Prime Minister's Brain, The revenge of the Demon Headmaster, The Demon Headmaster takes over, The Demon Headmaster strikes again, and Facing the Demon Headmaster. They must be read in order to make sense of what is going on.
Some of the language in Demon Headmaster seems dated, mainly Lloyd's food related exclamations, which make it read very much like a 1950s Enid Blyton book (no bad thing - and my sons often laughs out loud at his expressions). But it's a well crafted story that kept my son's attention throughout, and, although tense in places, it's surprisingly non-scary considering the plot-line. Unlike his favourite AstroSaurs and Captain Underpants books, this book is probably more girl friendly as well. Just a shame the excellent TV series isn't available on DVD at the moment to compliment this very good book (aimed at 7-12s I would say). It just loses a star as we missed the illustrations of the Puffin version.
the demon headmaster - Rated
Even though I'm probably not in the intended age range for this book now, I was when I first read it. And it makes a very entertaining read even now!! The 'us against them' type story appeals to kids between about 7 / 13. I'm not sure when it was written, but parts of it (language used, specifically) haven't aged all that well. I would reccomend it for children, definitely.
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