Terry’s Dumb Dot Story – A Treehouse Tale

Andy Griffiths's Terry's Dumb Dot Story is a very short treehouse story for 7 year olds about what happens when the illustrator is allowed to have a go at narrating.

What happens

Andy and Terry live in a treehouse with a bowling alley, a chocolate waterfall, a tank of man-eating sharks and a secret underground laboratory. It's also where they make their books. Andy writes the words. Terry draws the pictures. That's the arrangement and Andy is quite firm about it.

Terry isn't. He reckons he can narrate too.

Their neighbour Jill suggests they just let him try, on the grounds that what's the worst that could happen. It's not as though the Story Police are going to turn up and arrest him.

So Terry starts. Once upon a time there was a dot.

Then another dot. Then lots of dots. Then the dots start joining up into lines, and the lines bend into shapes, and the shapes join into more complicated shapes, and then the shapes multiply and multiply until the whole lot explodes and everyone in the treehouse is left as a heap of wonky pieces of themselves.

At which point Terry admits he has absolutely no idea what happens next.

It's the sort of joke a 7 year old finds enormously satisfying, because they've been that person. They've started a story with no ending and had to bluff their way out. Andy's escape route, when it comes, is the oldest cheat in the book, and it's the reason the Story Police end up surrounding the tree.

Fair warning that it's brief. Even a slow reader will be through it in one go, and a fair bit of the story lives in the pictures rather than the words. Terry is, after all, mostly filling the pages with dots, and Andy says so. That's fine if it's a bedtime one-off. It isn't a week's worth of book.

Nothing in it needs any caution at all. Nobody's really hurt, the peril is made of shapes, and the worst thing that happens to anyone is being turned temporarily into a squiggle.

What to read next

If your reader wants the treehouse properly, you'll find The 13-Storey Treehouse on the shelves as well. Andy and Terry again, Jill next door again, the shark tank again, and it opens with Terry painting a real cat bright yellow so he can turn it into a canary.