To everyone, even those who don’t know my long love-to-hate relationship with the books, I refer to Pittacus Lore’s series exclusively as IAmSexy Number Four. There is a whole legion of very confused people wandering around the Midwest trying to find such an excellently titled series. Sometimes they actually stumble upon the real books and, after reading the first, they say, “Meg, this is utterly terrible. Why did you make them sound so good?”

And I always tell them, “Wait, read the second one. It gets better.”

And that, canaries, is how I lose friends.

I can’t help it. I am Number Four is one of the biggest train wrecks of a series I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. I really want to share the joy of my disgust with others. So that is why I am beyond excited that the first five chapters of the next book, Rise of Nine, are available over at Entertainment Weekly.

For those who need a little backstory, here’s a run down of plot:

Nine aliens were sent from their besieged world to hide out on Earth. Due to a handy spell, as long as all nine aliens keep apart from one another, they can’t be killed out of numerical order. The first book opens with Four realizing that Three has been killed, and that he is now at the top of the hit list. And then a whole crapton of high school drama happens that is terrible and boring and takes forever and nothing exciting actually happens until like the last fifty pages when Number Six shows up and bitchslaps everyone in her path. In the second book, the narrative is split between Number Four, who is on the run because the cops think he’s a terrorist because he sort of blew up his high school, and Number Seven, who lives in a convent. Almost literally nothing happens in this book, either, likely because one of the characters lives in a freaking convent.

I’m not doing a good job selling these books. Look, the narration is rather terrible, the characters are one dimensional, and occasionally giant aliens march in to blow things up. This is an awesome B-scifi flick in book form. It’s so bad, it’s actually good.

Don’t believe me? Check out the first five chapters here.

The full book hits stores August 21. And you know I already have it preordered for my nook, so look for a full review coming soon.