My FANGtastically Evil Vampire Pet 02 – Space Cat-astrophe

Mo O'Hara's Space Cat-astrophe is a daft, fast and very funny camp story for 7 year olds about a boy, his secret vampire kitten and an astronaut who's proud to be evil.

What happens

Mark is at Evil Scientist Summer Camp. Pets are strictly banned, so of course he's smuggled in Fang, his vampire kitten, in an extra-deep pocket of his white lab coat.

This week there's a very special guest. Neil Strongarm is an evil astronaut (the man who SHOULD have been first on the moon, if you ask him) and he's looking for apprentices for his secret space station. Mark is his biggest fan. He even had the action figure.

Then Strongarm inflates a whole practice space station over the campsite and the gravity changes. Every camper starts to float. So does Fang, claws out, heading straight for the roof of a dome she could pop in seconds!

What follows is one ridiculous test after another. A spinning G-force machine, a space suit strength challenge, a flight simulator race. All the while Mark is trying to hide a cross, sleepy kitten inside his helmet. You can imagine how that goes.

Mark tells the story himself and he's great company. He's desperate to impress, a bit full of himself and usually one step behind what's going on. Your reader will probably spot things before he does, which is part of the joke. Why is Sanj, who's hopeless at video games, suddenly amazing on the flight simulator?

The rest of the camp is a treat too. Igor only ever says "Urgh" (Mark swears he can tell what each one means). Geeky Girl thinks an evil astronaut makes no sense at all, then turns out to be annoyingly good at the tests.

There's nothing scary here. The evil is all cartoon villainy and mwhaa-haa-haa laughs, which makes it a great pick for a reader who likes their jokes big and loud.

What to read next

This is the second book about Mark and Fang, and it starts with them already at camp. If they'd like to see how a vampire kitten got smuggled into Evil Scientist Summer Camp in the first place, the very first Vampire Pet book is waiting in the library.