The Day My Butt Went Psycho!

"I have always been deeply suspicious of my own bottom so for me this this was a very scary book. The general setup is that there’s a twelve year old boy named Zack whose bottom rebels against him. His bottom is part of a worldwide federation, a rebellion of bottoms which are fed up of doing the dirty work and want to replace themselves with the faces. I think it’s quite scary because even though it sounds like the most stupid and preposterous setup for a book, it’s actually really well written and – apologies for the number of times I’m going to say the word ‘bottom’ – you see Zack detached from his bottom and it’s again the human evil stuff. Andy Griffiths characterises the bottoms and you can fully understand their struggle. I remember reading it and I was quite scared about the great ‘bumcano’, a bum volcano, and I thought it was a great and startlingly original evil plan. Broadly speaking, it’s a comedy but with the plot of an action adventure, and like all good action adventure stories there are thrills and scary bits where you might have to put the book in the fridge for a little while and then before you return to it you have to explain to your mother why there’s a bottom book in the fridge. It’s like a very well written family film with scary moments but a good gag count as well. Yes, you probably do. The clue is in the title and on the first page it says ‘unfortunately the scratch and sniff edition of this is not available.’ But as I said, it’s a really well written book because you’ve got these two sides and you can sympathise with the bottom."