“And thus Pete embarks on another journey that’ll likely end 2 or 3 volumes in: Goosebumps!
The bumps definitely, as Jack Black put it so delicately, “goosed” me when I was a kid. Mostly Stay Out of the Basement, a book in which the main characters mostly do the one thing that they are asked not to do, like, CONSTANTLY. Seriously the dad says the phrase “Stay out of the basement!” TWICE IN THE FIRST CHAPTER. Can he make it clearer that the kids should remain anywhere but in the basement?
I also had dabblings with one of the mummy ones, which I remember being spooky, The Werewolf of Fever Swamp is one I tried to read while I had a fever, and the mention of fevers didn’t help. Say Cheese and Die I quite liked, and whatever the hell that one was where a kid got turned into a bee rocked my ass, and Horrorland sounded like mostly a great time, having been to Haunted Trails in Joliet, IL, many times.
I never fucked with Fear Street, maybe that seemed to mature for me, by which I mean too much romantic subplot, not buckets of blood. I DID read The Beast, which I can only assume was about a haunted rollercoaster because a scary rollercoaster was on the cover. I’ll have to revisit that one. It was like a complete barnburner at the Scholastic Book Fair because it was like, Oh, Shit, RL Stine is at it again, and this time there are no geese in sight.
Alright, the Dead House to Which We Are Welcomed:
A couple kids and their parents show up at the dead house, which is a shitty old house in a small town somewhere…let’s say Ohio. The dad inherited it from his rich, dead, estranged uncle who’d he’d never heard about, and nothing about this seems fishy to him, which bothered me until, in the book’s opening, the dad explains that by moving into this house, which is already paid off, he will never again have to make a mortgage payment, can quit his job, and now he’ll write full time. Relatable. If someone said, “Hey, Pete, you can quit your job, write full time, BUT you have to move into a spooky house in a spooky town,” I’d be like, “Sorry, I stopped listening after the part where you said I didn’t have to work anymore, but the good news is that I’m packed.” I’d think nonsense like blood running down the walls might really fuckup the wifi signal, but that kind of thing doesn’t happen in the Dead House anyway, so we’d be cool.
The bulk of the book reminds me of Dracula, not because of its lasting narrative or vivid characters, but because we are presented with a series of things that should make the protagonists suspicious but do not. Such as:
+Dog who never misbehaves barking at EVERYBODY (although I was suspicious that this dog DOES always bark at everyone, and the owners have just decided to always say, “Huh, weird, he never does this” as a method of throwing off the person being barked at so maybe they’ll think it’s somehow their fault).
+Ghost kids in the house constantly.
+Kids encircling our heroes, not menacingly at first, and then about to beat the shit out of them with baseball bats.
+A kid who burns in the beam of a halogen flashlight.
You know, standard “moving to a new town” stuff.
Now, this book fails the Does The Dog Die? test, which I put WELL above the Bechdel Test when considering entertainment options. I mean, subconscious disregard for the thoughts and opinions of women is one thing, outright pupper murder is another.
Which kind of bummed me out because there’s really no reason for it, and I was like, “Damn, RL Stine, you came out of the gate hard on this one.” If you’d asked me, I would’ve thought every Goosebumps would probably feature a pet in peril, but then he’d miraculously survive, like that dog who narrowly avoids getting blowed up in Independence Day by jumping into an alley with a stripper. Meanwhile, Harvey Fierstein bites the big one. DoesFiersteinDie.com is a new site I’m starting to avoid these shocks.
Harvey Fierstein was in something called Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance? Age of Resistance? Since when is Dark Crystal all Star Wars and shit?
Anyway, the book just kind of hums along with various spooky things happening and our narrator talking herself out of being spooked by them, until we get to the climax where we find out everyone in town is dead except our heroes, and they’ll be dead soon because once every year the townspeople “need blood.” For what, eh, who knows? Blood is something geists need, so we’ll just go with it.
The kids manage an escape by pushing over a huge tree, murdering all the townspeople, and our end coda is the family moving out of the house, grateful that their house back home hadn’t sold yet.
Which, hot tip to anyone who “needs blood,” maybe hold off until it’s likely the other house has sold. That way, maybe the family is like, “Well, on one hand, ghouls attempting to feast on our blood nightly. On the other, I would like to again reiterate that I’m not a fan of working.”
I would probably rather struggle for my life than work, is message I’m sending here. Please help me.
As our heroine is getting ready to leave, she sees another family pull up to the house, about to move in, and it seems all the ghosts who were murdered in the graveyard are back and once again up to their old shenanigans. And our heroine turns and runs, the end.
Which, I’m like, “Bitch, you narrowly escaped death, it’s the middle of the day when the ghosts are at their weakest, you couldn’t spare five seconds to be like, ‘Hi, new in town? Estranged uncle gave you this place? Yeah, us too, don’t buy it, everyone is a vampire. I know you probably won’t listen to a tween who tells you this, but just go to the graveyard, everyone in town has a grave there, and as you notice weird shit going on, you’ll realize I was right. Hopefully this warning comes early enough to potentially spare you the worst of consequences, and, please, if you have a pet, keep it inside and close to you at all times, these fuckers will kill that son of a pup like it’s no big thing.'””