The Bad Guys 19 – The Serpent and the Beast

Aaron Blabey's nineteenth Bad Guys book, The Serpent and the Beast, is a big noisy showdown for 7 year olds about a wolf who refuses to give up on his best friend.

What happens

This one isn't a place to start. It drops you straight into the middle of the gang's biggest adventure, with Mr Wolf on his own. His friends have vanished and a giant grinning centipede wants Wolf to join him. Wolf says no (obviously).

Worse still, Snake is on the other side. He's wearing a dark hood, calling Wolf "Wolfie" and firing zaps at him. So who's going to help?

Some very odd old friends, as it turns out. Legs the spider goes by The General these days. There's a laser-eyed bird called Joy and an award-winning journalist who also ends wars. They've been travelling through space and time for ages (Wolf thinks they left about an hour ago).

The jokes keep coming even in the middle of the battle. Baddies get zapped into a spoon called Dickie and a tiny bumblebee. There's a mix-up over whether one new friend is a giant bottom (it's actually a pair of hands). And when a villain yells "Fear me!" the answer is just "No. Shan't."

Like the rest of the series it's told almost completely in pictures and speech bubbles. The villain talks in scratchy, spooky capitals and whole pages of the fight are just ZAP! and BLOAW! Your reader will probably race through it in one sitting.

Under all the noise there's a lot of heart. Wolf has a little speech about how the wrong choice is easy and the right one is sometimes HARD. Snake cries even while he's fighting him. It's really a story about friendship and not giving up on someone.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

It's a lot darker than where the series began. The villain promises to watch Wolf suffer and tells him to give in or die. There are lots of tears, the heroes get knocked out of the sky, and it ends on a BIG cliffhanger that carries on into the next episode.

A child who finds scary villains or unfinished endings upsetting might want you close by for this one. Nothing gory happens though (the baddies mostly get zapped into something small and harmless). If your reader has been with the gang all the way, they'll be gripped.

What to read next

If they haven't met the gang yet, go right back to the beginning with The Bad Guys Episode One. It's where Mr Wolf first tries to talk Snake, Shark and Piranha into being good guys, and it's in the library too.