The Day That Aliens Nearly Ate Our Brains

Tom McLaughlin's The Day That Aliens Nearly Ate Our Brains is a very silly emergency for 7 year olds, starring two best friends and the end of the world.

What happens

Freddy and Sal want to watch a wrestling match on next door's telly. Freddy's solution is a homemade satellite dish. Sal's job is to stand on a chair holding it up, wearing a colander, for a whole hour.

The dish is the plastic cone the dog had to wear after a trip to the vet, wrapped in tinfoil. That tells you most of what you need to know about these two.

It works, sort of. It also fires their signal out into space, where an alien called Alan has been watching Earth's television for some time and has decided the galaxy would be better off without us. He now knows exactly where to find them. They have until ten o'clock tonight.

Alan is the reason to read this book. He's been learning English off the telly, so he speaks in enormous capitals and gets it very nearly right. SHUTTY YOUR FACE FLAP. He is fond of crumpets. He has an assistant called Brian who sounds extremely tired of him.

The boys' plan for saving the world is to tell a responsible adult, which is exactly what you would want them to do, and it goes wrong immediately. Their first responsible adult is Hilda the angry lollipop lady, who swings at them. Their second is Sal's uncle Clive, a desk sergeant currently managing a cat up a tree.

What it feels like to read is two children being funny at each other, from the first page on. Sal mishears everything. Freddy is exasperated in the way you can only be with your best friend. Nobody believes them and they keep going anyway.

One thing to flag, and only just. Alan talks a great deal about eating everyone's brains and killing everybody to death, and there's a countdown running through the whole thing. It's played entirely for laughs and he's about as frightening as a sock puppet, but a younger reader who takes an end-of-the-world threat seriously might want you nearby for the first chapter.

What to read next

If this one lands, try The Day I Started a Mega Robot Invasion next. Same author, same shape of joke, and this time it's a girl inventor whose bright idea gets away from her.