While it’s aimed at a Young Adult audience and the subtext is never too far from the surface, Klune’s writing gives it weight. Watching these innocent, misunderstood children be judged by small-minded locals and even by Linus himself, gives the book a real emotional hook that I wasn’t expecting. And the assortment of children at Marsyas feels ripe for animation – a female gnome, a wyvern, a fairy, a shy boy who turns into a dog, an amorphous blob who dreams of becoming a bellhop, and Lucy (short for Lucifer) the Antichrist. Baker’s perennially bitter neighbour is a cartoon character from the minds of Laika.

Baker’s office at DICOMY, run by bureaucratic toadies under the eye of Extremely Upper Management is a grotesque exaggeration of your average corporate open plan space. Klune’s blend of humour and magic reminded me of Neil Gaiman and Roald Dahl (with maybe a dash of Terry Pratchett), blending the supernatural with the absurd. But the house has a secret that could ruin this little found family. As Linus slowly gets used to the island’s inhabitants he must fight to remain impartial, to the children and to the charmingly strange Parnassus. The orphanage and the children are viewed with suspicion by some of the local townspeople.

The usually sedentary bachelor is forced out across the country to impartially report back on the Marsyas Island Orphanage and its peculiar master Arthur Parnassus. Middle-aged, overweight and moderately unsuccessful case worker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, Linus Baker is sent on assignment to assess a special school. The setting of a school attended by strange children with a gay headmaster combined with a bureaucratic ministry looking after the supernatural may scream “Harry Potter”, but queer author TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea is more Miss Peregrine than Professor McGonagall, with a dash of gay romance and well, the Antichrist thrown in for good measure.

Tj klune house in the cerulean sea