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Jack Meggitt-Phillips's Revenge of the Beast is a gruesome comedy for 8 year olds about two very bad people having a go at being good.
Ebenezer Tweezer is five hundred and eleven years old and looks about twenty. He managed that by keeping something monstrous upstairs and feeding it whatever it asked for. In exchange, it vomited up presents. Bath salts. A dessert fridge. A mind-reading vacuum cleaner (it tidies the room the moment you think it looks dusty).
The monstrous thing is gone now. Bethany, a prankster with no manners whatsoever, has announced a de-beasting. Everything it ever gave him is leaving the house, and after that the two of them are going to be good people.
She starts by dragging every single one of his presents onto the front lawn and selling them. Neither of them has any idea what things cost, so a diamond-encrusted cheese board goes for twelve pounds and seventy-three pence and a piano goes for twenty worms.
Ebenezer helps. Ebenezer also cries inside about every bare patch on the wall.
Running alongside all this is the story of how he met the beast in the first place, back when he was eleven and so unpopular that he practised conversation on a wall outside the pie shop. It is genuinely sad. It is also where the book shows its teeth, because what the beast offers a lonely boy is the chance to be the one doing the frightening, and he likes it.
That's the flavour of the whole thing. Very silly on top, properly dark underneath, and the narrator is having a marvellous time.
One thing to be ready for. The beast eats living creatures and asks for children, and in the flashback three bullies throw rocks at Ebenezer and one of them ends up begging for his life while Ebenezer laughs. It's played for laughs in the way Roald Dahl plays cruelty for laughs, but if your reader is the sort who feels sorry for the spider, some of this will land harder than it's meant to. If they enjoy revolting jokes and characters who are allowed to be awful, they'll be fine and probably gleeful.
It's the second book about Ebenezer and Bethany, and starting here does spoil a bit of the first.
So try The Beast and the Bethany first, which is where a beautiful, terrible man walks into a bird shop and a small girl with BOG OFF on her backpack buys ten worms.
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