The Arcade

Insert coin. Lose child. Skegwell-on-Sea is dying. The pier is rotting, the season is over, and the only thing still glowing on the boardwalk is Funland Amusements: a neon-soaked arcade that hasn't changed since 1979. In its back corner squats the Grab-A-Lot 3000, a claw machine nobody has ever won. Its prizes sit heaped behind the glass: a teddy with a red patch, a Spider-Man yo-yo, a single pink jelly sandal. Each one matches, stitch for stitch, something a local child was carrying the day they vanished. When nine-year-old Tyler Hollis disappears in the ninety seconds his mother looks away, disgraced 1986 pinball champion turned pier-duty copper Sergeant Marcus Pike is forced back to the arcade he has avoided since he was a boy. Three days later, Tyler's dinosaur keyring appears behind the glass. With a furious chip-shop fryer, a retired librarian armed with forty-seven years of newspaper cuttings, and a teenage livestreamer with twenty-two months of footage nobody believed, Marcus must face the machine that ruined his life and win the game that can't be won. One man. One machine. One credit. From Lee Emerick comes a gloriously overwrought horror-comedy of seaside dread, possessed whack-a-moles and the finest sentence ever written about wrists. Everybody's a winner.