The Aliens are Coming!

We haven’t seen anything like enough of Colin McNaughton in recent years so this is a welcome reissue of this 1995 picture book. Repackaged into a planet-shaped book, it reminds us of the author’s playful preoccupation with all things weird, smelly and daft. Told in rollicking verse, McNaughton’s endlessly inventive parade of nutty extraterrestrials arrives from an array of orbiting planets in the form of cheese, eyeballs, doughnuts, bananas and anything else you might (or might not) think of. The climax of the book reminds us that however frightened we might be of the weird and unfamiliar, nothing could be quite as scary as ourselves.