Fatbag – The Demon Vacuum Cleaner

A vacuum cleaner with a slurping mouth on the end of its hose escapes into the night in Fatbag, Jeremy Strong's daft and very funny story for 8 year olds.

What happens

Elsie Bunce cleans Roper School and she does not like the new machine one bit. It is nearly as big as she is. It has two switches on top that look exactly like eyes. She is certain it is staring at her. Mr Prentiss the caretaker tells her firmly that vacuum cleaners do not stare.

She names it Fatbag. Then she switches it on.

It eats the drawing pins and the pencils and the apple cores, which is the idea. Then it eats a girl's cardigan and an old tennis shoe. Then it gets through the maths books and a pair of curtains, and it will not switch off, and when Elsie yanks the plug out of the wall Fatbag snatches it straight back.

She ends up hiding in the art cupboard while everything in there gets sucked out under the door.

This is such a good read-aloud. Strong writes the chase like a monster film and then undercuts it constantly. Mr Prentiss backs down the corridor telling the vacuum cleaner not to be silly and asking it to switch itself off. Then he promises it that he never called it Fatbag, that was Mrs Bunce, it was not his idea at all.

Once Fatbag is out in the rain you find out what he is actually up to. He is heading back to the factory where he was made, to free the other machines, including one extremely wicked lawnmower. Then the Great Revolution. Then no more people.

The greed is the best bit. Fatbag swallows a rose bush and half a rockery and burps. He takes six tail feathers off a passing owl without even slowing down.

If anything gives you pause it is the scale of the panic in that first chapter. Two adults are properly frightened, one of them faints, and the owl comes off badly. It is all played for laughs and the laughs do land. But a child who lies awake thinking about what is in the cupboard under the stairs might want this one read in daylight.

What to read next

For more of something that flatly refuses to be controlled, there is The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog, in which a boy is bribed thirty pounds to walk a dog who can out-accelerate a torpedo.