Bumping Geese 2: Stay Out Of The Basement

When I was young, I happened to see the original 1960 Little Shop of Horrors. I'd seen the 1986 film adaptation of the stage musical, and I was a fan, so seeing the original film was an exciting novelty.

The 1960 film and the 1986 film have very different endings. Spoilers. In the 1986 film, Seymour electrocutes the plant and it dies and then Seymour and Audrey live happily ever after.

In the 1960 version, the plant just fucking eats him. And then the monster plant's flowers open for an expectant and excited crowd, and the flowers have the faces of all the people the plant has eaten.

Little Nope Of Horrors

That shit fucked me up. To this day just the thought of it gives me chills. Looking up that image on Google, it occurs to me that my mind has probably made the whole thing a lot more horrific and convincing than 1960 film effects actually allowed, but, you know, I'm happy not to go back and double check.

Anyway.

Goosebumps book #2, 'Stay Out Of The Basement' is some creepy shit about about monster plants.

Nothing good has ever happened in a basement

Oh, and this one is also weirdly damp. A lot more wetness going on. Anyway.

'Stay Out Of The Basement' concerns the Brewer family - mother, father, son Casey and daughter Margaret - and the strange goings-on in their basement. The Brewer family live in California, and the father, a doctor of botany, has just lost his job as a researcher at California Polytechnic. Rather than get another job, he decides to hide himself away in the basement for hours on end, conducting botanical experiments on his own, continuing the very work that got him fired from the university.

This obviously puts a strain on his relationship the children and Mrs Brewer. Then Mrs Brewer's sister in Arizona is hospitalised, and Mrs Brewer must go to assist her sister, leaving Casey and Margret in the precarious care of their now estranged Father.

Margaret immediately notices strange new developments in her father's worsening state. Not only is he cold and distant, but he stops eating with his family, a wound on his arm never seems to heal in the weeks they are alone with him, and eventually they even discover his hair has fallen out and he is growing leaves from his scalp. At one point a visitor comes to see Dr Brewer's work and seems to vanish completely, never leaving the basement.

Several times, Casey and Margaret sneak into the basement to look at what their father is up to, and see their basement has been almost completely transformed into a rainforest of bizarre new plants. They find evidence of the missing guest and hear strange, human-sounding noises coming from a locked supply closet. Attempts to get their father to open up are met with vague half-truths about his attempts to splice plant and animal DNA to create a new kind of life form that is both animal and vegetable.

Pokemon. Dr Brewer is just breeding Pokemon.

In the book's finale, Margaret's worst fears are realised when they break into the supply closet and find their father tied up and gagged, apparently locked away by a plant monster that has replaced him. Or perhaps this Dr Brewer in the supply closet is the plant monster copy, locked away for being a dangerous abomination? In the end it is up to poor Margaret to decide which is their real father and which one gets the axe. Literally.

And it seems she chooses right, when the closet-father speaks warmly to her in a way the plant monster never did. Most of the remaining plants are destroyed, and the ones that are less creepy are moved to the garden. The family is reunited, safe again, and it looks as though Dr Brewer may even get his job back. Apparently California Polytech has changed its position on funding mad scientists playing God. Makes sense.

But then, in the final moments, Margaret is outside amongst the strange new plants when she notices one of them seems to be trying to get her attention. And that little flower appears to have the face, and voice, of her father!

What a twist!

And also.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK RL STINE

I've heard that Walt Disney once said children are resilient enough to handle anything so long as there is a happy ending.

Apparently Mr Goosebumps has a different philosophy, which is

FUCK THE KIDS, HERE'S SOME TRAUMA

Okay. Look. Plant monsters creep me out. This book reads like it was written specifically to scare me. Like the first book, the horror is well delivered. The tension is real, the scares are effective. I didn't notice any major inconsistencies in the narrative like in 'Welcome To Dead House' and there were fewer jump scares.

Jump scares, by the way, don't work well in books. In films they're over used and obnoxious, but they can at least get the heart racing. In books, they always - ALWAYS - fall flat.

So in every way this book is an improvement on the last. Better written, creepier, an even more imaginative set up with even more frightening monsters. Dialogue is still a bit awkward. But, look, this review is coming out on a Monday because I was so surprised by how much I enjoyed book #1 that I could hardly wait to get to book #2. That's praise enough on its own, right?

But 'Stay Out Of The Basement' also made it clear why these books were a success and why, decades later, I can read them as an adult and still get pulled into them, still have them tug on all the right emotions, can overlook that I outgrew this reading level a long time ago.

The best horror serves as an exploration of humanity's common and real anxieties. I've said this before right here in on this blog. A haunted house is never just a haunted house. A slasher is never just a slasher. A zombie is never just a zombie. Beneath the surface of great horror is something all of us feel in our daily lives. 'Stay Out of The Basement' is about creepy plant monsters, but it's also about a father who loses his job and retreats from his family into an unhealthy obsession to try and regain his pride. It's about a husband and wife who become estranged from each other and in doing so, from their children. It's about grown up problems shaking the foundations of grown up lives, and it's told from the view of children who don't quite get it, who see the problem, but the adults won't talk to them about it. Their parents try to protect them by keeping them at a distance, but in doing so only expose them to new danger.*

The Brewer family is in crisis, and that manifests as a plant monster that replaces their loving father and fills their house with a dark, primal, prehistoric dread...

And then it has a creepy as fuck ending because, again: fuck the kids, here's some trauma.

*No Marxism this week. One analysis is enough.

Bumping Geese 1: Welcome To Dead House

I - and you may know this already - am a crazy person. Sometimes I have crazy ideas. Sometimes I vocalise those crazy ideas and then my friends encourage me. This is what happened when I said recently, apropos of nothing, 

 "Hey, I never read any Goosebumps books when I was a child, even though I'm totally the kind of person who would enjoy them." 

And then I said "Well there's nothing stopping me from going out and reading them now, as an adult, who is probably still the kind of person who would enjoy them. Hey, why don't I read EVERY GOOSEBUMPS BOOK EVER."

And because I am friends with a bunch of enablers, I was encouraged. Thanks, friends!

So now I'm going to read every Goosebumps book, in order of release, one a week, until I finish them. Or get really depressed and give up on life. We'll see. And maybe I'll find a way to turn my reading of spoopy children's books into Marxist propaganda, because that's another thing I like to do.

I mean, not just spoopy children's books specifically. I can turn almost anything into Marxist propaganda. I know this because I said I could, one day, and again, I am friends with enablers of my own personal madness.

Anyway. So the first Goosebumps book ever released is Welcome To Dead House, first published in 1992. I think I read some kind of later edition, though, because stuff is mentioned as happening in the early 2000s and nobody mentions how that's weird or in the future, so I guess the dates were goose-bumped forward a bit for later audiences? I dunno.

Magenta is definitely the spookiest colour

'Welcome To Dead House' is the unusually moist story about Amanda Benson and her family - brother Josh, mother who I don't think gets a name, and father Jack - who are notified that their father's great uncle who he has never heard of has died and left him a whole house in his will. Jack, sees nothing unusual about this and, presumably between sending money to exiled Nigerian princes, packs up his family and all their belongings, quits his job, and moves them to the small town of Dark Falls and into their new, totally free, totally not haunted mansion.

But it turns out inheriting a random house in a random town from a random relative you've never met is a little suss, and indeed the whole town of Dark Falls is a little suss. It's very dark and cold, there's lots of shadows but not many people around, and the Benson family pet dog Petey, normally a well behaved little guy, seems to hate the town and everybody in it he meets. 

Pro tip for you all, in case you ever find yourself in a horror movie or novel, if your normally well behaved dog starts barking a lot, GTFO ASAP. Always trust dogs.

Amanda struggles to sleep, has bad dreams when she does sleep, and keeps seeing mysterious children running around her new house and hearing disembodied giggles and whispers. Frequently she finds her clothes have been moved or scattered about while she's not looking. Between the disappearing children, ghostly whispers, the one time the kids in the neighbourhood do what looks like an attempted murder, Amanda thinks maybe Dark Falls is a bad place.

Unfortunately for Amanda, everybody around her has yet to unpack their brains from the move, and her parents gaslight the shit out of her every time she says something, until even she begins to doubt her own experiences. Turns out she was right, though, and everybody in Dark Falls is a zombie ghost (or maybe a ghost zombie) and every year they con some random family into moving into the Benson's new house before killing them. And then that family also become ghost zombie zombie ghosts and the vicious cycle continues... for reasons.

But don't worry. Amanda and Josh manage to murder the fuck out of every zombie in the town and then move back to their old house. And it all ends happily ever after. EXCEPT MAYBE NOT OMG TWIST ENDING.

The ending reminds me of the Christopher Nolan film "Inception". You remember how (SPOILERS BEGIN) Leonardo DiCaprio finally reunites with his family and before he hugs his children he spins his little top thing and it wobbles but doesn't fall and the film ends and you're meant to be all "Is he still dreaming after all?! WHO CAN TELL." (SPOILERS END) and it's a terrible scene and the movie should have stopped before it wasted your time with that ambiguous nonsense?

'Welcome To Dead House' pulls that same shit.

And it's bad.

The prose is nothing special, of course. But this is a spoopy children's novel for children, so I really can't judge it for being simple and using small words like 'if' and 'it' instead of big words like 'Constantinople' and 'Timbuktu'. There are also some minor errors of continuity which aren't huge but definitely made me stop and go "Huh?" and that made the narrative feel a little clumsy in ways that "It's for kids!" isn't a valid excuse.

Also, as mentioned, the book is just bizarrely moist. Every other page something is being described in terms of how damp it is. As far as weird fixations of horror authors go, I prefer reading about wetness than, say, the way Stephen King gets weirdly hung up on describing what character's penises are doing, but, still... Why? Why all the fluid?

All that said, it was still enjoyable. The tension at points genuinely had me gripped and some of the frightening imagery was surprisingly intense and scary. Graphic macabre body horror is not something I was expecting, but, hey, I'm always onboard for body horror.

The ghost zombie zombie ghosts were also a neat idea. I call them that because they don't really fit into either category. They're very much their own monstrous thing and I give points for creativity to horror authors doing something unique with their monsters.

So that's that. All in all, a fun time. An enjoyable novel, goose warts and all.

One Goosebumps book down. I don't even know how many there are, or how long this will take, but I'm genuinely looking forward to reading more and continuing with this random exercise in not-nostalgia. Join me next week as we bump more geese with 'Stay Out Of The Basement'.