Garbage Pail Kids 1 – Welcome to Smellville

R. L. Stine's Welcome to Smellville is the first Garbage Pail Kids book, a gross-out comedy for 8 year olds about ten children running a house with no grown-ups in it.

What happens

Adam Bomb starts us off at the school science fair. His project is a conveyor belt for washing cats. He has borrowed the teacher's cat without telling the teacher.

It takes three people to get Fluffy out of the machine. She still has some fur. Mostly on her legs.

His friend Rob Slob loses first prize to the Perfect twins and their fruit solar system. Rob's entry was a case of Strange Minerals, which turn out to have come from his nose.

You can see what sort of book this is.

Then the real problem arrives. Mr and Mrs Perfect are coming round to find out whether the children next door have any parents. They don't. If anyone finds out, they'll be split up and sent away.

The best trick here is that the story keeps changing hands. Adam tells a chapter, then Brainy Janey takes over with "let me tell you what really happened", then Cranky Frankie, then Luke Puke. Each one is sure the others have got it wrong.

Your reader gets the same afternoon over again with a slightly different version each time (Frankie's version begins with him standing outside, knocking, being ignored).

The jokes are almost entirely bodies. Snot, sick, a parrot who threatens to peck your eyes out, and a boy whose hair drops insects when he scratches it. Is any of it clever? Not remotely. Is it funny if you are eight? Enormously.

If it isn't funny in your house, be warned, because there's no let-up. The teacher pinches a pupil to stop a fight and tells a nervous boy that yes, everyone is better than him. It's played as a joke. A child who takes adult comments seriously may not read it that way.

There's a real ache underneath too, and it's the best bit. Nobody in that house knows where they came from, why they're different or how they ended up together. Janey is the cleverest person they know and she doesn't know either.

What to read next

If the nose minerals go down well, book two is in the library. There's a Smellville Pet Contest coming, the Perfects own a genuinely perfect dog, and a hippopotamus follows Rob Slob home. It's called Thrills and Chills.