The Bad Guys 17 – Let the Games Begin!

Aaron Blabey's Let the Games Begin is the seventeenth Bad Guys book, a very loud comic-style adventure for 7 year olds with a game show host made entirely of ears.

What happens

Wolf, Agent Fox and a couple of friends are stuck in a giant arena packed with grinning worms. All they have to do is cross the floor and reach the next doorway. Sounds easy, right? It's NOT.

The trouble is the band. Some of their old pals are up there playing heavy metal at them, and the singer is Snake (now in a big black hood and calling himself the Dark Lord of Serpents). Then the rocks start falling and the floor turns into lava.

Meanwhile another bunch of friends are flying towards Earth in a spaceship shaped like a bottom. Yes, really. On the way they crash straight through a restaurant that sells poop burgers and poop shakes (don't ask).

It reads like a comic. Most pages are one big picture or a strip of panels with a speech bubble or two. The sound effects get whole pages to themselves (DOOBITTA! KA-BLAW! VOOP!), so it's quick and noisy to read alone.

Piranha is trapped in a floating bubble and fights back by farting, until Snake yells that farting is not a strategy. Wolf spends a whole page puzzling over why the villains all have a double A in their names. If your reader loves a toilet joke, this is pretty much heaven.

Underneath all the noise there's something sweet. The book opens on a car chase with a much younger Wolf and Snake, and later Wolf tells his oldest friend that it's all his fault. He's the one who set Snake on the wrong path when they were kids. It's a lovely, honest moment between two friends who've known each other for years.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The last few pages get quite dark and emotional for such a silly series, and the story stops on a huge cliffhanger. A child who hates being left hanging might find that hard. One who's followed the gang this far will be used to a big "to be continued" moment.

What to read next

This is one long story told across lots of books, so it really is best read in order. If your reader is new to the gang, go right back to Episode One, where Wolf first tries to talk Snake, Piranha and Shark into being good guys.