cover image Camp Creepy Time: The Adventures of Einstein P. Fleet

Camp Creepy Time: The Adventures of Einstein P. Fleet

Gina Gershon, Dann Gershon, . . Putnam, $16.99 (215pp) ISBN 978-0-399-24737-8

Actress Gershon teamed up with her brother to pen this slapstick-studded farce featuring a wisecracking 13-year-old computer geek whose parents ship him off to summer camp in the Mojave Desert. Einstein’s first clue that there’s something wacky about Camp Creepy Time is the fact that his fellow campers are wearing either vampire, mummy or werewolf costumes on the bus ride. Upon arrival, the kids discover dilapidated buildings, virtually no planned activities and an oddball staff, including a nurse who compulsively feeds them salt tablets. Between bites of his beloved Twinkies, Einstein makes friends with the ghost of a man who owned the camp years before and with a teen he assumes is a camper, but who is actually an alien working as an undercover agent for the Intergalactic Monster Police Squad. Her mission is to foil the plot of an extraterrestrial gangster who has employed the camp counselors—themselves aliens—to transform the campers into actual vampires, mummies and werewolves (via the interaction between the salt tablets and the costumes) so that he can sell them to an intergalactic monster zoo. A protracted, predictably preposterous showdown between the good and bad guys caps this inane caper, which may elicit more groans than guffaws. Ages 10-up. (May)