Alien Invasion in My Backyard: An EMU Club Adventure

"There's no mystery—the EMU Club is a hit! This is a fun, funny adventure that kids will love to read."
—Lincoln Peirce, author of Big Nate

"The EMU Club inhabits exactly the world I always hoped to live in when I was 12, when the answer to questions like 'Where did I put my toy' led inevitably to alien conspiracies and secret underground tunnels. A book for the curious and adventurous!" -—Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Little Brother

"An adventure so funny you’ll think it couldn’t be true–but if it isn’t true, then where did all those realistic-looking photographs come from? You’d better read this so you’ll know what to do when the world ends." -Adam Rex, author, The True Meaning of Smekday

"The funniest book about unbelievable kid mystery exploring I've ever read. The only real mystery is why you aren't reading this book RIGHT NOW!"
-Elliott Kalan, Famous TV Writer

My name is Stuart Tennemeier, and I’m the President of the EMU Club (short for Exploration-Mystery-Unbelievable Club). This is my report for our first mission.

Did you ever want to start a club with a friend, but you didn’t even know how to find a mystery to solve? Like, how would you even know there was a jewel heist or a haunted shack somewhere in your town? And how could you even begin to investigate it if you did?

What if you started a club to solve other kinds of mysteries. Not huge crimes or weird stuff, but everyday mysteries that happen to everyone, like whatever happened to that game controller we lost?

There are tons of little mysteries all around us. Sometimes if you look really, really closely at them, you find out some amazing, incredible things. And you just might save the world.

 Ruben Bolling started Tom the Dancing Bug while a student at Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1987. He launched the strip professionally in a small New York City newspaper in 1990 and self-syndicated until Universal Press Syndicate signed it up in June 1997. Bolling lives in New York City with his wife and three children.