I'm a 13 year old boy who lives on a farm down in South Arkansas, and I have a best friend named  John Clayton. Well, last summer was about the wildest biggest mess I have ever seen. To start with, we entered the Norphlet Cornbread Festival trying to win the junior division---and yeah, we kinda cheated, but so did everbody else, and well even the Hogskin Hoppers, a walker drill team from the End of the Trail Rest Home couldn't stop the train wreck.

Of course, the big wedding between Bubba and Lulu Belle happened right in the middle of everything. But it wasn't just your regular old wedding. Naw, not on your life. It was in the Holiness Church of the Hills and those folks handles snakes---but old Bubba handles snakes by 40 whacks with a hoe, and he was without a hoe when the preacher handed him a snake.

Yeah, and a bunch of other stuff came up that summer, and just as we thought it was gonna be one of them slow, hot Arkansas summers with nothing to do, we happened up on some real space creatures. And you know what? What they was gonna do was really bad. They was fixing to harvest the Earth. Like you do when it time to  pick peas in the garden. Well, it was just us and a 1000 of them, and well, you'll hafta read the dang book to find out how it all came out.