The Amazing Mr Pleebus ¦ The Freaky Beastie of Hill Road School

Mr Pleebus is a vaguely humanoid, shapeshifting creature who emerges from a parallel universe into Joey and Pandora's world via a television set on which they have been playing computer games. He appears to be a benign creature, but his obvious distress is explained when he is followed by a hoard of demonic grooblies whose leader wants to take over the universe. The groobiies are defeated in the first book, but a resurgence of residual evil occurs in the second, when a wicked doppel-ganger of Mr Pleebus invades the children's school.

Both of these crowded little cartoon books are a lot of fun. The slapstick and surreal stories, whose texture is somewhat reminiscent of Pratchett's Discworld, bound along at an exhilarating pace. But I found it troubling that the evil forces in the books are depicted as jet black creatures who struggle against fairer skinned goodies.