Read The Bad Guys 14 – They’re Bee-hind You! free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Aaron Blabey's They're Bee-hind You is the fourteenth Bad Guys book, a sticky, buzzing, very silly comic adventure for 7 year olds where even the skyscrapers are made of honey.
It opens with a flashback. A young Mr Snake scares off two bullies by playing the venomous snake, and a young Mr Wolf in sunglasses gives him a round of applause. It's a sweet little scene (keep it in mind for later).
Then we're dropped straight back into the middle of things. Wolf, Shark and Piranha are in a brand new universe with some new friends, and Fox is out cold. Mr Snake isn't with them. He's working for the villains now.
Their feet are stuck to the floor. They're high up a giant tower made of honey, and the doorway out is somewhere in the basement. So who builds with honey? Bees. Killer bees in suits and ties, and there are THOUSANDS of them.
Meanwhile the rest of the team (officially the B-Team now, to their disgust) are on a spaceship, chased by a villain with chainsaws for hands. Piranha has turned into some kind of oracle. He can talk to his papa on that spaceship from inside his own head, and he snaps out of it with an enormous fart.
The jokes are VERY daft. Piranha's big tip for his dad is to let the dinosaur eat him (Milton the dinosaur is not keen). Wolf escapes the bees by sliding down the outside of the tower with Fox in his arms. When he finally stops tumbling, a sign saying BASEMENT falls on his head.
On the page it's nearly all pictures, speech bubbles and huge sound effects. One run of fight pages is just SMACK, CLANG and BUZZZZ. A confident reader can whizz through it in a sitting.
There's heart under the silliness, too. Piranha tells Snake they love him and he should just come home. Wolf promises Fox he'll be with her till the end, and Fox's reaction is lovely.
The villains look properly creepy and shout in spiky, scratchy lettering. It ends on a cliffhanger, with a grinning dentist, a whirring drill and the words "To be continued". A child who's easily spooked might like a grown-up nearby. If they've loved the spookier Bad Guys books so far, they'll be gripped.
It picks up mid-adventure and doesn't stop to explain, so it's much better read in order. If your reader hasn't met the gang yet, start at the very beginning with Episode One.
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