Fuck this nightmare book. Hi, I’m the Internet’s Seanbaby, handsome humorist from beloved comedy website 1900hotdog.com, and I’m telling you right now CETO’S NEW FRIENDS is, without question, some bullshit. I understand this sentence will be used against us if humanity is ever on trial for being too goddamn stupid to live, but this book was written by a certified public accountant who wants children to know the fun and wonder of alien abductions.
The accountant author, who sucks at at least one of those things, is named Leah A. Haley. Leah A. Haley is a series of white letters written almost exclusively in calligraphed serif italics. It’s the first name on a reservation list for a maskless COVID-19 brunch. When Leah A. Haley applies for a change of address, a government employee sees “Leah A. Haley” on the form and stamps “DOES NOT FUCK” on it.
What Leah A. Haley does do is believe in aliens. Most alien nutjobs are incurious, troubled people who wish they could solve their sad problems with star magic, and CETO’S NEW FRIENDS is like all these emotional disorders having a nuclear meltdown. Please hear me and believe me when I say: Fuck this crazy bitch and her crazy book.
The dedication is “For Our Children,” but if you can show me a book less safe for children, I’ll say, “HOW TO COVER YOURSELF IN MOOSE URINE DURING MATING SEASON FOR KIDS? I think you made up this fake book to ruin the point I was trying to make.” My copy of CETO’S NEW FRIENDS was previously owned by the Sandusky Library, which kept track of their books by putting little price tag stickers on them and then not even coming close to scratching them off after they were returned. So by counting the half-torn stickers and claw marks, I know this was checked out five times before they took it out of circulation. So that’s at least five people in Ohio who are objectively unfit parents and whom we also can’t trust when the visitors arrive.
The story opens with Ceto on a faraway planet. This is all we are told about him. Leah A. Haley doesn’t know what the planet is called or any of Ceto’s customs we might interpret as virtues, hobbies, or personality. He’s just from space, and that’s all Leah A. Haley needs to know to trust him with the brains and orifices of her children.
Annie and Seth live on Earth, and this is what illustrator Lisa Dusenberry, a “curious and open-minded” UFO investigator, thinks children from Earth look like. The back of the book says she often works with abductees to illustrate their experiences, which might explain why the children look like they were drawn by someone whose main body of work is sketches of space monsters undressing lonely people.
There is fucking nothing to do in space, so Ceto came to Earth to watch Annie and Seth play netless volleyball. The leading causes of death on this planet are disease and violence, and this idiot lady thinks aliens are going to just send their babies millions of light years to pointlessly float through our backyards. Are Ceto’s parents back home telepathically saying, “It’s worth the star risk, lover! Our Ceto has to experience Earth sports!” There’s not a backyard in America where this alien wouldn’t be shot out of the air by seven kinds of firearms, and the signals we broadcast into space make this very clear.
Oh, good. Ceto gets creepier.
These kids seem old enough to know they should at least go inside and ask their parents if it’s okay to go into space with their new friend Ceto. I don’t care how reassuringly featureless a creature’s pubis is, no parent is going to let it take their kids off-planet after one game of marbles. So here’s where the story ends, right?
I’m sure it’ll be fine.
Jesus fucking Christ. CETO’S NEW FRIENDS was produced by two women who, together, looked at this picture and said, “This is perfect. This is exactly how safe children should look in a story about happy things.” This is 100% the first thing I would behead with a shovel if it was walking next to the animated remains of Osama bin Laden. What the fuck went wrong in Leah A. Haley‘s life that made her think this is cute? If these goddamn horrors ever start talking with their mouths, the first thing they’re going to say is, “We are the ghosts of abortions. We are here for your skin.”
Ceto’s got a fucking Playschool spaceship console. Is that really how you steer the thing, Ceto, or is this just what you let the stupid Earth children play with? You don’t really honk on 700 giant plastic baby-colored buttons to navigate the stars, do you?
Think of the danger these children are in. Let’s ignore the obvious — how there’s no reason to think Ceto will return them home, or if he would even know which fucking big dumb button would take them there anyway. They are breathing in microscopic creatures from a different galaxy and smearing the same all over Ceto’s toddler console. Do we really think this race of super powerful beings are going to stay benevolent when Ceto brings back Annie’s head lice and Seth’s hand, foot, and mouth disease? Or as Ceto’s people will call it “horblax, foot and morblax disease alpha 7.” This is an act of intergalactic biological war. I mean, read a book on intergalactic biological warfare, Leah A. Haley, you dingbat cow.
Leah A. Haley‘s imagination conjured up three activities the children could do in space and two of them were fucking around with props from an uninspired 1950s sci-fi movie. Was this worth a whole page of a 28 page book– Annie and Seth watching bar graphs on Ceto’s shitty console?
You really went all out to entertain these kids, Ceto. “I AM SPEAKING TO YOU WITH MY EYES, EARTH YOUNGLINGS. SORRY, I DON’T GET ANY CHANNELS THIS FAR FROM MY HOME. I GUESS YOU CAN WATCH STATIC WHILE I CLEANSE MY BORBLAX EXCAVATION TOOLS. AH, MY TRANSLATO-TRON SAYS YOU CALL THEM BUTTHOLES.”
So Ceto brings them home, presumably hours later. Maybe days? Months? He gives them the gift of “a purple rock” which will definitely do nothing to help convince their parents they were in space this whole time. I don’t think you have to be a parent to imagine how pissed off you’d be if your kids vanished and came back with just the dumbest fucking UFO story. A story just dumb as all shit. If you were kicked in the head by a donkey, this UFO story is what you’d tell your doctor to let him know the current treatment wasn’t working. Leah A. Haley writes like aliens took turns shitting in her brain as a space prank.
“Our new friend let us press random buttons on an unlabeled starship console! We killed a moon! We saw a green line! What do you mean you don’t believe us? This unremarkable chunk of quartz proves our story to be true!”
Why? To harvest the beings you planted in them? To check in and see if their faces ever grew into human shapes? What was gained or learned from any of this? What idle beings would bend the laws of time and space and risk interplanetary war to give two mute children the galaxy’s most boring spaceship ride? This book is the squarest, dullest moron’s lack of foresight and imagination laid bare. This bitch has nothing going on in her mind other than an obsession with make-believe. I firmly believe if an ice cream truck driver drove into Leah A. Haley’s living room and screamed “I need baby teeth for my chrono-drive,” this idiot kook would give him all her children and proudly write a book called How I Raised Time Dentists.
