There’s difficult adolescence – losing one’s mother and not getting on with one’s father – and then there’s being threatened by the Giant Shape-shifting, Multi-bodied, Trans-dimensional Flea you unwittingly brought into this world from its own. Not only that, but it can call itself Ursula (Charlie Brooks), turn into a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, seduce your father, boss you around like a mother and control your sister. Not only that, but it wants to bring all its Giant etc Flea mates here to ravage the Earth. Not only that but they all have to travel through your body to get here as if you were some kind of inter-dimensional Channel Tunnel.

Although the text references Boy’s love of Narnia and Alice in Wonderland, we’re in much more dangerous territory. (Although Ursula might have a distant cousin in the former.) Boy’s only hope lies in the Hempstock family.

The three generations of Hempstocks have possibly run their farm for a 1000 years. They have a nice line in doomy mutterings of the Things lurk out there – The old old country bleeds – There is a rip in everything – variety, and all three are female because they ‘don’t go in for that sort of thing’. They also constantly undermine Boy’s confidence in anything he believes or takes for granted. But grand daughter Lettie (Millie Hikasa) takes a shine to Boy and offers assistance. However the Family is not as competent as it thinks itself, and since the undermined Boy is now something of a loose cannon himself, things turn out badly.