I Left My Sneakers in Dimension X
Bruce Coville's 1994 sequel to Aliens Ate My Homework, the one where Rod Allbright and his bratty cousin Elspeth get snatched into another dimension by a monster called Smorkus Flinders. Exactly the kind of paperback that came home in a book-fair bag or got renewed twice at the library, from the author who had already turned a whole grade's worth of kids into alien believers.
Bruce Coville was born in Syracuse, New York, on May 16, 1950, and worked as a toymaker, a gravedigger, a cookware salesman, an assembly-line worker and an elementary-school teacher before his first book, The Foolish Giant, appeared in 1977 with illustrations by Katherine Coville. By the early 1990s aliens had become his signature: My Teacher Is an Alien (1989) and its three sequels, finished in 1992, and then a new series that began in 1993 with Aliens Ate My Homework, in which a boy named Rod Allbright meets the crew of a Galactic Patrol ship called the Ferkel. The series is usually called Rod Allbright's Alien Adventures, and Aladdin and Pocket Books' Minstrel line carried it.
I Left My Sneakers in Dimension X, the second book, was published in 1994 as a Minstrel hardcover from Pocket Books, 180 pages with Katherine Coville's illustrations. Rod and his cousin Elspeth are captured by Smorkus Flinders, a villain who crosses over from Dimension X looking for revenge on the Ferkel's crew for imprisoning his friend BKR. Captain Grakker's crew rescues them and they escape Castle Chaos, but the Ferkel is damaged beyond repair and everyone is stranded. Snout disappears, a shapeshifter named Galuspa helps out, Rod bonds with a creature called a Chibling and becomes an apprentice to Tar Gibbons, and the crew learns that Smorkus was a decent person before a Reality Quake turned him into a monster. The villains plan to merge Dimensions X and Q; the last stand is back at Castle Chaos, where Rod grows to giant size to fight Smorkus and then learns the monster knows something about his missing father. The book ends with Rod handing his sneakers to Spar Kellis, which is where the title comes from.
Two more books finished the arc, The Search for Snout (sold in Britain as Aliens Stole My Dad) and Aliens Stole My Body, and the first one eventually became a 2018 film, Aliens Ate My Homework, directed by Sean McNamara with William Shatner in the cast; it premiered on Netflix in the United States on March 6, 2018. Coville himself kept going. His website counts more than 100 books over 40-plus years of writing for kids, he co-founded the audiobook company Full Cast Audio, and he has three Golden Duck Awards for children's science fiction, including one for My Teacher Glows in the Dark in 1992.
Ask a reader of a certain age where they found the Rod Allbright books and the answer is usually a place rather than a store: the book-fair table set up in the gym, or the paperback rack at the public library. That is the memory the series lives in. The plots were pure kid logic, a spaceship in a bedroom, a cousin you did not ask for, a monster from a dimension with an X in its name, and Coville wrote them fast and funny enough that a 180-page book was gone in a weekend.
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