Harry the Poisonous Centipede: A Story To Make You Squirm

Lynne Reid Banks's Harry the Poisonous Centipede is a funny, squirmy adventure for 8 year olds about a young centipede who's been told never, ever to go Up the Up-Pipe.

What happens

Harry's real name is Hxzltl. Centipedish has no vowels, just a very faint crackling, so the narrator gives up and calls him Harry. His mum, Belinda, is really Bkvlbbchk (don't even try).

They live in cool, dark tunnels under a very hot country. Harry sleeps all day, hunts beetles and worms all night, and thinks forty-two legs is a perfectly normal number to have. He's very proud of his poison pincers.

Belinda is a brilliant mum, and a worried one. She warns him about flying-swoopers and belly-crawlers. Most of all she warns him about Hoo-Mins. They're enormous, they walk about on just two legs, and they very nearly squashed her. Twice.

Children will work out who the Hoo-Mins are long before Harry does, and that's a big part of the fun. A shower drain becomes the terrifying Up-Pipe. A person's foot is as long as two whole centipedes. Seeing us from down there is funny, and slightly unsettling too.

Harry means to be good. But his best friend George (real name Grnddjl) calls him sissyfeelers for staying home with his mum. George always wants a thrill. So Harry nearly drowns trying to swim like his marine cousins, lies to his mum about it, and follows George up into the no-top-world.

The narrator talks straight to your reader the whole way through, and it's very chatty. There are asides about Latin, about why you shouldn't ask what Belinda's name is, and about what we'd call a wet blanket (a centipede says dry sandbed). It reads aloud beautifully.

There's real peril in here. Harry nearly drowns early on. Later a Hoo-Min swings a stick at George, and smoke drives the centipedes out of their tunnels. Belinda's rescue of George is the best bit. She runs straight up a Hoo-Min's trouser leg and bites him! Afterwards George gets forty-two spanks, one per foot (the narrator assures you a thick cuticle helps).

If your reader loves creepy-crawlies, or likes a book that makes them look at the world from a very different angle, this is a treat.

What to read next

If they've fallen for a many-legged hero, James and the Giant Peach has a Centipede too. He boasts about his hundred legs, until the Earthworm tells everyone he's only got forty-two, exactly like Harry.