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Imagine a sciency type fiction book, add some British humor, and make it a "children's" book that isn't really for children.

That is what I was told to expect when this book was suggested to me as some light Halloween reading. What I got instead? Poop. Yes, one big heaping steaming pile of poop.

Using the physical energy produced by the Large Hadron Collider and the spiritual energy (?) created by a few amateur dabblers in the dark arts, a portal between hell and earth is cracked open a slight bit. The four most ignorant and incompetent demons you could possibly imagine slide through this crack and are tasked with creating a larger breach so that the Dark Malevolence himself might stride through and turn earth into a second hell.

That is the premise of this book. The fact that the LHC and CERN are mentioned here and there as well as black holes and wormholes I guess is what was supposed to make this an "intelligent" kids book? If so, then we must ignore the fact that the few science concepts breached are either ridiculously oversimplified or just plain wrong (often both).

The British humor in here... OK, so I'm not a Brit and perhaps I missed a thing or two. But I often love British humor. I'm a huge fan of Doug Adams and Monty Python among others. But stacking this book up against those is like putting a first time, off-Broadway amateur comedian and stacking him up against Chris Rock and George Carlin. This book was just not funny. To be fair, it was obvious that the author was trying really, really hard to be funny. He just wasn't.

And the children's book premise? This is certainly no Narnia or Hobbit. I guess this has more of a feel of Diary of a Wimpy Kid? But even there, the comparison is just not fair. I would not recommend this book to children. I wouldn't recommend it to adults. Unless, of course, they are short of toilet paper...