After a plane-crash on an uninhabited island a group of schoolboys survive, no adults do.  They assemble on the beach, waiting to be rescued.  They start organizing themselves, select a leader, make homes, and look for food.  Rescue seems to be staying longer than they hoped.  What started as a firm group however soon starts to crumble apart, as dissident voices emerge...

This starts as any other adventure novel.  Robinson Crusoe if you like, in plural.  Soon however the fading hopes and growing fears turn this boy scout camp out into something more primitive.  Each has his fears, uncontrollable at night.  Those fears take over the rational thinking, and soon this well-behaved group of school-boys turns into a tribe of faceless savages.

According to the cover The Times wrote about this book that Golding knows exactly what boys are like; he has a compelling imagination; and the vivid realism with which he describes the disintegration of their untried and precarious civilization under the pressure of raw nature carries the reader to the bloody climax.  Not much to add there.  I thought it was creepy.  And the creepiest of all is how much parallels there are with today's society - let's hope it doesn't lead as far.