Garbage Pail Kids 3 – Camp Daze

R. L. Stine's Camp Daze is a gross-out comedy for 8 year olds about ten very messy children heading off to summer camp.

What happens

The Garbage Pail Kids live together in a big old house in Smellville, with no grown-ups at all. They don't know where their parents went. They don't seem too worried about it either.

Before camp even starts, they hold a practice campfire indoors, using the furniture as firewood. It isn't even their house. You can probably guess how that goes.

Then it's off to Camp Lemme-Owttahere on the shores of Lake Bleccch (yes, really). The owner talks almost entirely in nonsense ("Ricky ticky!"). The food truck hasn't turned up, so everyone has to go out and catch their own dinner. And the head counsellor is Mama, the dreadful stand-in mum they'd got rid of before, who swings a mean cane.

Meanwhile the perfect twins, Patty and Peter Perfect, have brought their own two-room tent and hot tub. They fully expect to be crowned Camp Champ again.

Each chapter is told by a different kid, and each one has a joke built into their name. Luke Puke is sick on the bus (twice). Rob Slob smells so bad that a bear runs away from him. Nervous Rex is frightened of fresh air.

This is a book of jokes, one after another, and a LOT of them are about bodies. Burps, snot, farts and sick all get their moment. If your reader is at the age where that's the funniest thing in the world, they'll be in heaven.

It's cartoon violence all the way through. Brooke cracks her head doing cheerleading jumps and doesn't notice, Mama whacks campers with her cane and a homemade trap snaps shut on someone's arm. Nobody is ever really hurt and none of it is meant seriously. Still, if you'd rather nobody copied the indoor campfire, it might be worth a quick chat!

Mama comes from an earlier adventure, and a couple of the other campers were met at a pet show, but the jokes work fine without knowing any of that.

What to read next

To meet the whole gang from the start, try Welcome to Smellville, where Adam Bomb enters the science fair with a machine for washing his teacher's cat.