No more ‘storeys’: children’s author, Andy Griffiths, and illustrator, Terry Denton, move on from treehouse

The adventures of Andy, Terry and Jill in their ever-growing treehouse come to an end with the latest release of the Treehouse series. Best friends Andy and Terry have been living in an ever-growing treehouse since 2011. What started as The 13-Storey Treehouse, now comes to an end 156 wacky storeys later. The 169-Storey Treehouse (Macmillan, $15) has 13 more crazy levels including Santa Land, an electric pony stable, a hall of funhouse mirrors and a gingerbread house. Andy and Terry along with Jill, find themselves facing their evil doppelgangers and worse still, a day at school! So why stop at 169 storeys? “I just felt the story had pretty much played out,” series author, Andy Griffiths, said. “We had explored 13 different aspects of the treehouse and effectively 13 different genres and I didn’t want to risk it becoming predictable.” “I think we achieved the perfect length and 13 was already encoded in the whole DNA of the book right from the start and it seemed poetically a beautiful place to stop, too.” The popularity of the series is down, in part, to the books having just the right balance of charm and “yuck”, something that grew out of working with illustrator Terry Denton for 30 years on a variety of titles like Just Disgusting and The Bad Book which, according to Griffiths, are 90 per cent “yuck’” “You had a treehouse which, although it has dangerous levels, is like a place like home so there is a place of safety and comfort. You can then go off and fly around space and have battles with giant eyeballs, but you’ll always come home,” Griffiths said. The Treehouse series has sold more than seven million copies, won eight Australian Book Industry awards, been published in 35 countries, and has made Griffiths and Denton the rock stars of the “kid lit” world. “It’s everything that I set out to achieve when I started writing,” Griffiths said. “It’s taken the reader on a wild fast ride into a completely imaginative and unpredictable space which is how I felt when I was reading the books that I loved as a child. I really wanted to pass that experience on despite the competition from computer games and movies and streaming television.” “I could die tomorrow and be very happy that I did what I needed to say.” But is there life beyond the treehouse? “I’m starting a new series but with a new illustrator and that’s been a really interesting and fun process. I’ll continue writing and exploring new adventures.”