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Westall creates a dystopian future as cutting and insightful as Orwell's. The science fiction novel Futuretrack Five is similarly compelling. The Devil on the Road is a particularly good example of Westall's sophistication and subtlety when dealing with the supernatural and of his ability to tell a story which is both contemplative and entirely gripping.

The fantastic, when used by Westall, is a device used within a story rather than the sole purpose of a story. While Westall's novels, for the most part, touch upon the supernatural, they tend to avoid the realms of fantasy. His characters of any age are often blessed with strength of will and purpose that is the ultimate hallmark of his stories. James, but Westall was especially adept at combining genres and merged all three themes effortlessly. Indeed, many think that his ghost stories are the finest since M. Westall's work can be roughly divided between the World War II tale, "school stories" and tales of the supernatural. He won the Carnegie Medal again in 1982 for The Scarecrows, the Smarties prize in 1989 for Blitzcat and the Guardian Award in 1991 for The Kingdom by the Sea. In its sequel, Fathom Five (1979), many of the same characters believe there to be a German spy in their home town of Garmouth. It was his first novel for children, winning the Carnegie Medal it was made into a BBC television serial in 1983. His children's fiction includes The Machine Gunners (1975), set during the Second World War, where a group of children living in North Shields, England try to retrieve a machine gun from the turret of a felled German aircraft. Westall's novel The Wheatstone Pond, adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2002, is particularly black in parts and is, in this manner, entirely indistinguishable from an adult novel. Many of his novels while supposedly aimed at a teenage audience deal with many complex, dark and in many ways adult themes. Robert Atkinson Westall (7 October 1929, North Shields – 15 April 1993, Warrington hospital) is the author of many books, mostly fiction for children, though also for adults, and non-fiction.