THE KILLER UNDERPANTS

Not even his encounter with a spectral Poltergoose (2002) prepares Jiggy McCue—or readers—for his next challenge: underwear with a mind of its own. Jiggy really has only himself to blame; discovering that he likes to wear each pair of briefs until it sloughs off, his Mom marches him to the flea market and buys him new ones that are both hideously ugly and, once donned, cling so stubbornly that nothing can pry them off. Worse yet, they not only bestow fierce, unscratchable itches, but at unpredictable times give anything Jiffy says the force of an irresistible command—as he finds out after blithely bidding buddy Pete to go flush his head in the toilet. As it turns out, the nasty knickers are the work of Neville the Devil, a junior Horned One out to make his mark on the world, “ ‘starting at the bottom,’ ” as he puts it. Luckily, Neville’s handiwork has an herbal Achilles’ heel, and Jiggy manages to lose the deadly drawers at last—only to see dismaying evidence that they’ve taken up residence within the trousers of brutish classmate Eejit Atkins. Replete with arch innuendo and pants-down misadventures that would make anyone but the irrepressible Jiggy want to crawl into a hole to die of embarrassment, this snappy episode will fly off library shelves on the, er, coattails of Captain Underpants. (Fiction. 10-12)