Liam Reilly is an unattached, occasionally delinquent, teenage ward of the state. He lives in a university workshop. He rides a bike made of bamboo. His best friend is an AI named Eiann. Oh, he’s a genius, too.

Liam is content with his life, until a demon named Narvicous Scalegrim Gorgonzola Grimmold Maximus the Terrible (Gerald for short) appears in his workshop eating Cheez-Its and twerking to Cardi B. When a bunch of frat boys open a gate to hell in their basement foosball lounge, it falls on Liam, Eiann, and Gerald to stop the demon army waiting on the other side. Liam — an avowed loner — is stuck working with a bunch of other social outcasts: Jeanie, a T-shirt entrepreneur; her excessively “woke” cousin Mitchell; their androgynous friend Jax a.k.a. Jax Vader a.k.a. DJ Max Spinz; and a mysterious, wise-cracking, East African ninja-assassin, Esmeralda — who also happens to be blind — except when she visits other dimensions; that’s a different story.

Thrown together with a busload of Latinx children trying to escape a migrant detention facility and an underworld demigod, Liam and his lab partners — eww, please don’t call them friends — basically have to save the world. If they can manage to save each other first.

Zombies, Frat Boys, Monster Flash Mobs is what you get when you take the supernatural capers of Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Sequence, add in the unabashed nerdiness of Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, followed by a helping of the irreverent edginess of an Angie Thomas novel. Zombies, Frat Boys, Monster Flash Mobs is current. It is socially relevant. Don’t call it a sequel! It’s not. But it is a part of an interconnected world, the Snog Team Six Series, with some returning characters, reoccurring themes, not to mention some running jokes — if you are hip enough to get them, wink wink, nudge nudge. Challenge accepted?