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story identification - Trying to remember the name of a grade-school book about an alien in a cereal box


When I was a kid (Grade school, Elementary, can't remember the exact grade, but it was between 1992 and 1999) I read a book about a kid who found an alien in his cereal. This alien informed him that he was there to defeat an evil threat to Earth, that took the form of the school's most popular student.


The alien came with a gun that did nothing, and the alien in the popular kid disguise had the power to make the kid's fingernails bleed by damaging his nerve endings. In the end, it was revealed that the evil alien had a huge craving for, and vulnerability towards, pizza flakes, and was defeated by gorging himself on them and then exploding.



Answer



This appears to be Aliens for Breakfast by Stephanie Spinner and Jonathan Etra. It was published in 1988 and is part of a trilogy including the books Aliens for Breakfast, Aliens for Lunch, and Aliens for Dinner.



book cover


One of the reviews specifically mentions the alien in the cereal and the popular kid being an evil alien in disguise.



When Richard is confronted with a tiny alien named Aric climbing out of his cereal bowl, he doesn't know what to think. But he's even more perplexed and overwhelmed when Aric wants his help to fight the evil Gorf, who is disguised as a popular new kid in Richard's class. What's worse is that there's a very simple way to defeat Gorf, but Aric can't remember it, leaving Richard to fend for himself in the fight against evil with very little but a wisecracking, condescending alien for backup. And if Richard fails, the consequences could be deadly.



Another review mentions a vulnerability to red pepper flakes:



i think i remember liking this book. something about aliens in disguise, and you can kill them with putting red pepper on their pizza



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