The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror by Daniel Pinkwater

First of all, in a well-organized world, there would be more than two "Snarkout Boys" books. I'm not saying Daniel Pinkwater would be still making them today - in a perfect world, he would make just as many as he wanted to, and all of the weird kids would find them and love them without conscious effort - but I have to believe there would be at least five or so.

But this world is not perfect, and so Pinkwater only wrote and published two books about the two young men - highschool sophomores in this second book, slightly older than most Pinkwater protagonists - and their adventures snarking out in the city of Baconburg (a thinly disguised Chicago, amalgamated from the then-current early-'80s version and Pinkwater's memories of growing up there in the '50s).

My sense is that Pinkwater's books for teens are plottier and full of more complicated jokes - and just longer - than his books for tweens. And, as a fan of Pinkwater, I want more Pinkwater in my Pinkwater, so I tend to think his teen books are his best.

This is the second Snarkout Boys book: I read this one because it was in the Pinkwater omnibus I was working through, 4 Fantastic Novels. There's another Pinkwater omnibus, 5 Novels, which is in the house somewhere (probably one of my kids' rooms, from their own youth), and that has the first Snarkout book, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. Pinkwater books are silly and not overly concerned with continuity, but you might as well read the first one first, unless you have a debilitating fear of avocados or something.

That finally brings me to The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror. It's about a year after the first book - our narrator Walter Galt and his friend Winston Bongo are now sophomores, as I mentioned, and Bongo has a car, which allows them a bit more freedom of movement. 

They're still "snarking out" - sneaking out of their houses at night to go see movies at the 24-hour Snark Street Theater, hence the name - which activity I'm afraid makes these books really solidly historical at this point. They still often meet their friend Rat - a rich punk girl from another school, actually named Bentley Saunders Harrison Matthews, but it's not her fault - at the theater. And there are still various oddballs they vaguely know and interact with.

But, this time, Baconburg is being terrorized by a werewolf. Or maybe a zombie - the expert thinks he's more like a zombie, but not actually one. Or maybe the fiendish criminal mastermind Wallace Nussbaum, whom the kids foiled in the first book and is now supposedly imprisoned at Devil's Island.

I'm not going to try to explain the plot, which is a lot of action and jokes, except to say that the heroes do win in the end, and it's hugely entertaining all along the way.

Some Pinkwater books - especially his burst of novels early this century - are deeper and more resonant. The Snarkout boys are Pinkwater in pure-entertainment mode, telling monster stories with all the the stops pulled out on his organ and every silly idea thrown in as soon as possible. Some readers are too serious for books like that, I know. If you are, I'm terribly sorry for you, and hope you some day get better. For the rest of us, this is prime-period silly Pinkwater, and it is glorious.