The Bad Guys 12 – The One?!

Aaron Blabey's twelfth Bad Guys book is a super silly, monster-packed comic for 7 year olds, and it's called The One?!

What happens

Mr Snake has gone over to the dark side. He's got scary new powers and some very dodgy new friends, the Underlords. Their boss is a giant centipede who plays heavy metal guitar (two guitars at once, actually).

Snake's job is to win his old friends round and bring the monsters someone they call the One.

Back with Mr Wolf and the gang, nobody knows who that is. Then it turns out Agent Fox has been keeping some VERY big secrets, and Kitty isn't happy about it at all.

Mr Piranha is having a strange time too. He floats about in a glowing cloud, shouting out map coordinates like a fishy fortune teller. And he farts every single time he has a vision. Who could resist that?

The numbers lead to a doorway out of our universe. So the gang race for it in a car, with glowing magic snakes on their tail. The doorway is hidden somewhere nobody would ever want to go (a burger restaurant that serves poop, if you must know).

It reads like a comic, with big pictures, speech bubbles and whole pages given over to sound effects (KA-BOOM! FAAAART!). There isn't much text on each page, so a confident reader can zoom through it.

The gang also know they're in a series, which is half the fun. Wolf reckons one bit of their past probably happened "around Book Six". When the team gets split in two, Joy the raven is furious to be stuck on the B-team in "a less important subplot".

Underneath the noise there's a friendship story too. Wolf keeps begging his old friend to come back ("BUDDY! This isn't you!").

Worth knowing before you hand it over

It opens with a flashback of little Snake at school, where the other kids scream at him and the caretaker swats him with a rake. The Underlords talk about destroying all living things, and a monster with chainsaws for arms turns up near the end. It's all cartoonish and nothing is gory, but a child who spooks easily might want a grown-up nearby.

It also stops on "To be continued", so expect questions about book 13.

What to read next

This is book twelve and it drops you straight into the middle of things. If your reader hasn't met Mr Wolf, Mr Snake, Mr Shark and Mr Piranha yet, go back to the first ever Bad Guys book and let them start there.