Onts (Secrets of Dripping Fang Series #1)

Nobody wants to adopt the Shluffmuffin twins. Wally's feet stink something awful, and Cheyenne is allergic to everything. Then why are the Mandible sisters so eager to take them home? And what sort of old maids would choose to live in a place called Dripping Fang Forest, where zombies wander the woods singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and ten-foot-long glowing slugs want to suck the feet right off your ankles?

Would it seem ungrateful of Wally to point out the Mandible sisters' extra arms? Or to question their all-chocolate, all-the-time menu? Or, um, to venture into the cellar, where the twins have been told to NEVER, EVER, EVER go?

Yeah, perhaps that last bit was a mistake. Now there's nothing left for the Shluffmuffins to do but run—run for their lives!

The debut of a hilarious series about two orphans and a world of monsters.

Publishers Weekly

The debut book in the paper-over-board Secrets of Dripping Fang series introduces the 10-year-old Shluffmuffin twins, whose father drowned in a "Porta Potti" and whose mother was smothered by "a gang of angry bunnies." No one who comes to the Jolly Days Orphanage wants to adopt either Cheyenne or Wally, since her allergies cause her to sneeze constantly, and his feet "reeked worse than festering, maggoty meat." But the siblings' luck seems to turn when two tall sisters with large heads and extra hands (sinisterly portrayed by Fischer in a wordless spread) arrive at the orphanage. After taking the twins to their house in Dripping Fang Forest, the sisters tell the children to address them as Aunt ("we pronounce Aunt as ont, not ant," the ladies instruct). Wally discovers that the two are, indeed, giant ants and are "breeding a race of super ants to enslave humans and take over Earth." Escaping into the forest, the twins narrowly escape some unpleasant encounters before temporarily taking refuge in the home of a professor and his wife-a large, hairy spider. Though kids may chuckle at some of these wacky bits, Greenburg's (the Zack Files series) outlandish humor often misses its mark. Ages 8-12. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

DAN GREENBURG is the creator of the enormously popular Zack Files series of middle grade novels as well as the author of a number of bestselling adult books, the most well-known of which is How to Be a Jewish Mother. He lives in New York.