WELCOME to the hottest new character in children's fiction. And no, it's not a person - not even an alien or a talking animal. It's a hotel.

Scarborough's famous Grand Hotel, in fact - though in North Yorkshire vicar-turned-bestselling author Graham Taylor's cracking new children's novel Mariah Mundi, it is called the Prince Regent.

The Prince Regent, as Graham re-imagines it, is a monster of a hotel. It's a huge, cavernous, rambling Victorian castle of a building. Passages run deep beneath the hotel itself - leading far out under the sea.

There are hidden rooms, ancient secrets, and a monstrous guardian of the deep in the form of a hideous giant crab.

And above all, there is a stench of sulphur and steam from the rickety steam-powered elevator that hurtles, shuddering and hissing, up and down and across and around the hotel from one end to another, ferrying guests, staff and mysterious strangers alike from room to room, level to level.

Not since Mervyn Peake's castle of Gormenghast has there been a building which has come alive in quite this way. Not even Harry Potter's school, Hogwarts, has quite the same demonic sense of identity, self and purpose.

Arriving at this monster of a hotel one dark, dank Victorian night is Mariah Mundi, a teenage orphan boy sent from a London foundling school to serve as apprentice to the hotel's resident magician, The Great Bizmillah.

Mariah is cold, miserable, frightened and alone. His fellow travellers on the steam train from York to Scarborough for the last stage of his journey - Captain Jack Charity, a soldier just home from the Sudan, and the sinister Isambard Black - were unfriendly and suspicious. Scarborough feels like the ends of the earth and Mariah knows no one.

He is welcomed at the hotel's tradesman's door by servant girl Sacha, and then the fun begins.

Mariah Mundi is a riotous adventure yarn in the best children's tradition. Mariah himself is the latest in a long line of foundling boys who have been sent to work at the Prince Regent. The others all mysteriously disappeared. Together, Mariah and Sacha set out to find what happened to them.

The plot is essentially a series of chases and narrow escapes - with the mysterious Midas Box, which turns everything put into it into gold, as the prize, and death as the penalty for failure if Mariah and Sacha are caught.

They explore deep subterranean passageways, narrowly escape the clutches of the Pagurus - a gigantic crab with scaly claws and staring eyes - and discover a hidden' floor in the hotel halfway between other floors after punching the wrong button in the steam elevator.

There, they uncover some secrets that make the hotel's evil owner, Otto Luger, all the more determined to kill them.

Pursued by a pair of malignant, sorcerer detectives - Grimm and Grendel, who can literally follow their victims' scent - they flee through the narrow streets of Scarborough, finally seeking refuge in the Golden Kipper restaurant, run by none-other than the misanthropic Captain Charity.

But he is not quite what he seems, and unexpectedly comes to their aid.

Anyone who's ever been fortunate enough to enjoy fish and chips at Scarborough's Golden Grid restaurant will recognise Graham's description of the Kipper: "Mariah sat at the end of a long table, neatly decked with upturned drinking glasses and silver cutlery, all set on the finest, whitest linen. Behind him was a tall glass window that looked out over the harbour A large brass and wood telescope stood majestically upon an oak tripod."

The brightly-lit Kipper, with its steaming pots of hot tea and the heavenly smell of frying fish, becomes a haven of peace and security in the mad world Mariah has entered. And Captain Charity, with his seamed, battle-scarred face, becomes a father figure to the lonely boy.

The plot, which also features a sea-monster known as the Kraken and a magical set of playing cards, comes to a satisfying conclusion after another set of hair-raising twists and turns. And the way is neatly prepared for a second novel featuring Mariah.

Because, yes, this is the first part of a new series: one that the author is deliberately pitching at the Potter-reading generation.

He had wanted to write something lighter and more humorous after the darkness of his recent novels Tersias and Wormwood, the former Vicar of Cloughton says.

He'd also wanted to write something about Scarborough, the town near which he lives.

As a young lad, before starting sixth form, he worked as a magician's apprentice at The Grand, he says. "It was all wonder. The place is haunted, there are the cellars beneath, which do go out under the sea, there was a theatre - really a fabulous place."

Not to mention his first girlfriend, a girl called Julia.

All that sense of awakening wonder, mystery and awe is captured in his description of the Prince Regent.

He has already written a second Mariah Mundi book set there - and a third, involving a journey to America from Liverpool aboard a ship suspiciously like The Titanic, is under way.

Who needs Harry Potter?

Mariah Mundi: The Midas Box by GP Taylor is published in hardback by Faber, priced £9.99.

The book is being launched in Scarborough today with a Treasure Hunt setting off from the Brunswick Centre.