More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids is a 2001 children's horror short-story collection from Scholastic UK by British author Jamie Rix and is the fourth book in the Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids book series. It was the first book to be written after the Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids cartoon adaptation by ITV, which aired on CITV. It was also the last book in the original book series before it was retooled in 2007 as Grizzly Tales: Cautionary Tales for Lovers of Squeam!, and is the book with the most stories at twenty, whereas the first and second had fifteen, the third had sixteen, and the rest that would later follow had six.
Synopsis
Knock Down Ginger Entomologist Mr Thrips is a pariah in the town of Nimby. He lives in one of the richest private streets (described as a "millionaire's row") next to people who drive Mercedes-Benz, Jeep and Jaguar cars, sharing a home full of several insect species which made his house look unkempt and creepy. Residents despise him for allowing the street to look uneven and nicknamed the house "Bug City Central", so his neighbours, the Pie family, become determined to get rid of him. At a council meeting, Amelia Pie terrifies the audience with her fears of Thrips' behaviour giving Nimby a bad reputation, which is heightened when Colonel Dithering claims that termites can eat houses. As the audience panics over their eaten houses disallowing them to park their cars and have cocktail parties, Amelia boasts her son will be the person to successfully scare Thrips out of town.
Ginger Pie and his friend "Mad" Milo have already been bullying Thrips through vandalising his front garden and writing/yelling insults through his letter box. Milo's lisping sister Liza does not understand why the two boys relish in targeting an innocent old man but she is usually ignored, and Milo spitefully reveals Liza's nickname "Lizzie the Lizard" through reverse psychology. Ginger echoes the town's sentiments and calls Thrips ugly, claiming he shares many resemblances to the insects he shares his house with, to which Liza points out Ginger's pale skin and pale, red hair, and says "you look like Dracula just drank your blood." Ginger spots Thrips gardening and crosses the road to call him an "insect maniac", but he is terrified when Thrips scolds him in a tranquil fury without turning around to look at him. Milo later suggests Thrips has literal eyes in the back of his head but Ginger adamantly replies that Thrips might be an insect humanoid who they need to chase out their town. Luckily, his mother already endorses the idea so he and Milo decide to make Thrips' stay uncomfortable by playing Knock Down Ginger. The boys calculate the length of time it takes for Thrips to get out of his armchair to answer the front door as ten minutes, and play Knock Down Ginger all day. Then Ginger jumps over the fence into the back garden to destroy Thrips' giant termite mounds but stops when he feels vibrations from the mud. Suddenly, Thrips appears in the kitchen and Ginger rushes back to the front door to take his turn at the doorbell. The door shoots open and Thrips drags Ginger inside.
Thrips threatens he will retaliate just as horribly if Ginger refuses to stop with his pranks but Ginger is distracted: insects pattern the walls and fly around the room, and he can feel some land all over his body. He agrees to stop and hears the humming vibrations that he heard from the termite mounds. He opens an opposite door to find a levitating chair, assuming that he had walked in on a magic trick but Thrips explains that his termites are eating the wood inside so fast that it is creating a hovering illusion. He snaps his fingers and the chair disintegrates onto the floor. When Ginger leaves, he warns Milo and Liza that Thrips is not impressed with their behaviour but Milo scoffs at Ginger's sudden reluctance, accusing him and Liza of overreacting as he stomps to the door. Ginger pushes him and his sister out of the way and presses the doorbell. 30 minutes later, despite ringing the bell continuously, there was still no response and a bored Ginger walked home. He checks his pockets for the house keys and presses the doorbell, which makes the ground gradually shake to the sound of high whistling. By the time Ginger realised what was happening, Thrips' termites had eaten through his shoes and the rest of his body. Amelia opens the door to see a wide-eyed, statue-like Ginger, who disintegrates into sawdust when she touches him. She slams the front door to grab a telephone and the house collapses around her. On the other side of the road, Thrips' termites sleep peacefully after their enormous dinner.
The Upset Stomach Ethel Turnip enjoys eating to the point of it being a hobby. She notices an article in the newspaper about a Yorkshire farm that breeds animal stomachs and demands her parents get her one for a Christmas present as she stands on the kitchen table. When her parents hesitate, Ethel promises to look after it like a pet and she will use it a "second stomach" for herself; she will even call it "Rover". A smelly, gurgling parcel arrives two weeks later with a stomach as big as a basketball, spraying stomach acid that landed on the tablecloth, making it dissolve smokily. Although Ethel regrets the decision, she is grateful that it does as she wants at the Christmas dinner, but Rover the stomach becomes a needy nuisance that always followed her around the house and woke her up at night, and whenever she took the stomach out for a walk, children would cackle until their clothes fell apart. After deliberately leaving the stomach in a kennel overnight, Ethel is forced to take the stomach out to walk again to warm it up (only because her father threatened to never serve her oven chips otherwise), so she attempts to abandon it in a park. Unfortunately for her, a policeman returns the stomach home.
Furious, Ethel wakes up early the next morning and stuffs Rover into six plastic bags. She travels to the countryside by bus to throw Rover into a cow herd, telling her parents that Rover died when she returns home. Rover goes on a vengeful rampage and eats everything in the countryside, and continues eating until it arrives home. Rover grows until the Prime Minister sends the British Army out with tanks but the stomach acid melts them, and is dubbed "The Killer Stomach" on the six o'clock news. The Turnip family meet the giant stomach outside their house and Ethel orders Rover to leave, but the stomach ignores her. Mr Turnip notices the rumbling and goes inside to get indigestion tablets, returning to find Rover rolling away and his daughter missing. Violent bubbling is heard and the stomach explodes across the street, and an undigested Ethel is launched through her bedroom window. She would never be greedy again, mostly because she stopped enjoying food: floating in Rover's insides damaged her sense of smell, making everything she ever eats taste offal.
The Gas Man Cometh The first noise Stefan Krott ever heard in his life was the delivery room's telephone, starting an obsession with telephones. His parents bought him a toy telephone, but he took the cordless phone to play with, annoying his parents and the people he dialed. To this day, his favorite phone calls are prank calls and frequently does them to emergency services, once alerting the police to a bugler and the RSPCA to a pelican crossing the road. When his parents remove his access to telephones, he buys a mobile and continued, pretending to be Michael Caine to dinner ladies and telling a school janitor that an escaped horse is in the gymnasium.
At nine-years-old, Mr. Stinky calls his mobile, so Krott uses his hygiene comedy routine on him until Stinky hangs up, but during another prank call much later, a voice briefly intersects the call and threatens, "Stefan, we've got your number." He finishes his prank call and hangs up, but the phone rings immediately. It is the threatening voice, calling themselves "The Gas Man", offering to sell him helium that can change voices when inhaled. Krott accepts the offer, excited to finally cheat his way into impersonating the Queen, and skips school the next day to wait for the delivery after his parents went to work. At 12:10pm, two men in suits and sunglasses arrive with a man dressed in a boilersuit and baseball cap holding a gas cylinder—the Gas Man with his two bodyguards. Krott offers to pay but the Gas Man gives the gas cylinder to him for free, and leads the bodyguards out of the house.
Krott reads the instructions thoroughly and rushes to the phone, using the helium every few minutes and speaking whenever the high-pitched vocals began. Every person he called is completely fooled and he ached from suppressing laughter. When he finishes telling a man that he will be sent to the Tower, Krott realises he has floated into space and grabs onto a satellite. His phone rings and the caller snaps, "Game over! You lose!" The phone deactivates.
The Urban Fox One morning, Lord and Lady Blunderbuss move into a busy council estate with their six horses and many beagles. The next day, they invite themselves inside the house of Mr and Mrs Smith, offering to befriend them. Although they are surprised that the elderly couple have no servants nor know any nearby bear-baiting clubs, it seems to be an ulterior motive to spy around the house, and they discover Mr and Mrs Smith's daughter, Parker, and her pet fox eating breakfast in the kitchen. The Blunderbuss couple declare that they will get rid of the fox for their neighbours (despite Parker and her parents protesting that their fox, Elvis, is an honorary family member) because a civilised society has no place for foxes. 30 minutes later, a bugle blares outside and the Smith family discover that the Blunderbuss couple had assembled their fox hunting team. Parker tells her parents not to panic and Elvis prepares to outwit his enemy.
The horses and beagles jump over the back garden fences as if they were hurdles as Elvis takes turns in different gardens disguising himself as garden ornaments, such as a bird bath, a satellite dish, a sunbather, a fishing gnome, and a croquet hoop. It tires the hunt to the point of Lord and Lady Blunderbuss agreeing that life in the city is not to their liking, so they gather their exhausted army with their belongings and move out. A street party is thrown in Elvis' honour where the neighbours express their gratitude to the Urban Fox. Meanwhile, the Blunderbuss couple have fled to Scotland to escape from the police, who pens them a letter ordering them to pay for property damage.
Spoilsport The Pinchguts are a mean family in the UK. They live in a horrible-looking house they refuse to tend to and the parents are so mean, they named their children Girl and Baby. Baby is the anomaly whereas Girl loves ruining people's happiness by destroying their fantasies: once, she forcibly shuts a ventriloquist's mouth to prove the dummy is not magical and she reveals Baby's birthday presents before he opened them. One evening, Baby's milk tooth falls out at dinnertime and he gushes his excitement of getting money from The Tooth Fairy. Girl snaps that fairies are not real, but when Baby finds money under his pillow the next morning, Girl insists it is from their parents. Ma and Pa are confused.