Thank you for bringing this memory back! Absolute banger art and book!
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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Oh my god I forgot about this! What an absolute banger!
I still have my copy. Love Coville's books.
Also he's really responsive on social media and a super nice guy if you ever want to say hello.
Oh, one other thing: If you love Coville, you should read some Henry Neff. Another fantastic author and super nice person.
It's really good to hear that he still stands up as a person.
KA Applegate too.
She does? I haven't heard any reference to her since the fantasy series she started mid-Animorphs. What's she doing now?
I loved these books as a kid. One of them had a line in it that really stuck with me:
"When technology advances, the technology to fool it advances too. There's a nice balance in that, don't you think?"
I really enjoyed My Teacher Flunked The Planet. I've got to go reread it. I feel like it might be topical.
I remember when books like these were offered on portable red, blue, and yellow shelves. Talking about the Scholastic book faires that would come to school in the 1980s. I don't remember what the colours represented, but I remember the colours clearly and I don't recall any green, purple, pink, black, white, or orange shelves, just those three colours, so I imagine they meant something. But I looked at everything.
I think I also got "The House With a Clock in its Walls," the cat vampire one, the vegetable vampire one (I forget the names), "Tom's Midnight Garden", and other school-friendly/age appropriate YA horror, before I discovered Stephen King and Dean Koontz. (And then I never looked at YA again, until the Harry Potter books started coming out. I'm still reading Sword Art Online, which is YA from Japan; they call it LN, or Light Novels, over there, but, same thing.)
I'm pretty sure they meant grade/reading level. You were encouraged to pick from your own, but it wasn't enforced.
Bunnicula?!
This cover sparked a memory for "Fat Men from Space" which was a book in a similar vein.
It's funny to me how so much of our media back then featured alien takeovers that only the kids had discovered.
I thought that was from Sluggy Freelance.
The vegetable vampire one was Bunnicula!
I meant bunny, not cat, but you're right. The one I remember — the name just randomly came to me — was The Celery Stalks at Midnight. Turns out it's from the same series. I didn't realise it was a series, I just remember the books.
Holy cow, I would never have thought of this book without something triggering the memory, but it was a great one! I think it was one of the books my teacher kept on the shelf for if you were done with classwork, and I blew through it in class.
This was one of my favorite books when I was in school. Bruce Coville wrote a lot of my favorites from that time period
It looks very Goosebump-y.
It does have a lot of that same vibe! His other series, the Magic Shop series, is the classic "The Devil sells you a cursed object" trope, but a lot of fun. Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, was another one that I loved a lot as a kid
Holy shit, Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher! 😭 I loved that book
Shoot, what was the book series about finding an alien in your cereal? It was called something like "there's an alien in my cereal!" No! That's somehow unrelated. I was thinking of Aliens for Breakfast by Jonathan Etra and Stephanie Spinner: 
Image: A children's book cover with cute cartoon art of a boy with glasses looking surprised by a tiny insectile being standing on his box of Alien Crisp cereal. Above the title (Aliens for Breakfast) is the smaller text "Richard doesn't know it yet, but he has only five days to save the world!"
In the top-right corner is a logo that reads A Stepping Stone Book, and in the bottom-right corner is the two authors' names, and "Illustrated by Steve Björkman".
I wouldn't be surprised if it's very popular among the sorts of folks who use Lemmy.
I'm not sure what you mean
We're old
I mean I think a lot of us are nerds who like sci-fi and possibly sympathize with the kid in the book who decides he wants to be abducted.
Don't forget about Have Space Suit, Will Travel
get outta here
What? I didn't mean it like it was a bad thing!
GET OUT OF HERE! THEY'RE COMING! TELL MY WIFE I LOVED YOU
Reeeeeally looks like 1980s Trump. Release the UFO files!
Omg I loved this book and a bunch of others by this author! Gotta see if they sell DRM free epubs somewhere so my kids can enjoy them.
What a pleasant blast from the past. Thanks OP!
They're all on Z-Lib, so they should be purchaseable somewhere.
People rip epubs all the time, them being on zlib doesn't necessarily mean drm free versions are available for purchase sadly
In the second book, I Left My Sneakers In Dimension X, there's a line from Snout that has roughly stuck with me all my life and influenced my philosophy on the world.
"Take of solace when solace is offered. The cup of pain cannot always be shared."
Between that and the discussion between Splinter & Raph in TMNT 1990, there was a lot to unpack there while I was coping with anger issues as a kid.
Wrong scene?
Goosebumps and the 1st TMNT film went pretty dark.
No I'm pretty sure that's the scene
i tried reading this to my kid and it scared the fuck outta them lmao
Maybe someone should have taught their teacher not to pull off his human mask while standing right in front of an open window.
The twist was that the aliens were cool
One of the teacher's big mistakes was to casually stare at the sun during recess
Reminds me of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Also "They Live".
I thought he was stabbing himself in the neck with a large parsnip until I zoomed in.