When teacher Eric Capadis commits suicide by throwing himself out of a window, his colleague Pierre Hoffman takes over his class. The children are unsettlingly well-behaved, and Hoffman is increasingly disturbed by the other teachers unwillingness to have anything to do with them and by a warning he receives from one of the pupils at Capadis' funeral. A parcel is delivered to his house, containing a small stuffed toy filled witl' worms, and anonymous phone calls are made to his home, a mixture of heavy breathing, hysterical laughter and sinister music. Over the school holidays, the child who had warned him is violentl attacked, but claims to remember nothing about But when Hoffman is persuaded to accompany his class on a school coach trip, all the pieces begin to fall into place and the plot comes to a head...

On the one hand a brilliant and surreal thriller, School's Out is also chillingly observant about our society and the children it is producing, in a novel that skates close to fantasy and yet seems all too believably true.