Bumping Geese 3: Monster Blood

 I had a dream I met R. L. Stine. He had heard about my endeavour to read all the Goosebumps books, to review and to analyse them, to catch up on a part of my childhood that never was. He was pleased by my decision and asked if he could help me. I told him he could give me a copy of all the books I still had to read, save me the cost of buying them all. He said he would, but they're out of print and he has no control over that. I thanked him, anyway, for his encouragement.

That's one of two Goosebumps related dreams I had this week.

At the start of the week, I began to receive questions about how far I was along with the next book, when this blog would be written.

So I guess this is just my life, now. It wouldn't bother me so much except, well... Friends...

'Monster Blood' sucked.

Nothing within the book resembles what is depicted here

'Welcome To Dead House' was a pleasant surprise. Flawed but engaging and creepier than I expected from a childrens' book. 'Stay Out of the Basement' was genuinely frightening and a marked improvement over the first book. 'Monster Blood' is what I was worried the series would be when I started reading it - uninspired childrens' adventure fiction masquerading as horror comedy but sorely lacking in both horror and comedy.

'Monster Blood'  is the story of Evan... Evan Ro.... Even Robbins? Roberts? Hold on.

Evan Ross. The Goosebumps wiki tells me his name was Evan Ross, which is handy, because apparently I've already begun the process of purging everything about this book from my memory.

Anyway. 'Monster Blood' is the story of Evan Ross, a young lad who goes to stay with his great aunt Kathryn while his parents look for a new home in Atlanta, where his father is being transferred for work. Kathryn is an eccentric crone and completely deaf. She also doesn't speak sign language or read lips, so she mostly just talks at people and to herself. And to her cat. She's a childless widower and Evan takes a quick dislike to her and her home. He is forced to sleep in a camping cot set up in her office, she has no TV, no toys, and Evan isn't interested in any of the books on her shelves. Worse still, her cat is a mean spirited animal that provokes Evan's pet dog Trigger, prompting Kathryn to force Trigger to stay outside for the duration of their stay. Topping it all off, Evan quickly gets the attention of the neighbourhood bullies, the Beymer twins.

The only respite for Evan is found in a friendship with Andy, a high-spirited girl from the neighbourhood. Andy shows Evan the town and takes him to a local toy shop, where Evan finds and purchases an old can of toy slime - basically silly putty - called Monster Blood. Evan and Andy have a good time messing around with the goop on the first day. While they're playing, Trigger steals a chunk and eats it, to Evan's chagrin, but the dog seems okay. The following day, though, Evan notices that the Monster Blood appears to be growing, and it tries to consume anything that touches it, including people. Trigger also begins growing at an alarming rate, eventually becoming the size of a pony.

Evan tries to conceal the sinister growing goop from his aunt by storing it in a series of increasingly large containers, even gives a chunk to Andy to take home. But Andy faces the same problem with her share of the Monster Blood. Eventually Evan tries to ask his aunt for help, writing a plea for assistance on some note paper, but Kathryn thinks it's a joke. Evan and Andy try taking the Monster Blood back to the toy store, and to the shifty shop-keeper who seemed reluctant to sell it in the first place, but the store has closed in the few days since they visited.

The novel climaxes when the Monster Blood, now as large as a large man, seems to come to life and begin terrorising Evan, Andy, Kathryn, and the Beymer Twins, consuming anything and everything it touches, trapping it in the depths of its slimy, oozy, bouncy core. And it sure is bouncy. The climactic scenes see the Monster Blood shape itself into a bouncing sphere so that it can chase down the protagonists.

And then, somehow, it gets even more ridiculous. Spoilers.

In the final moments, it is revealed that Aunt Kathryn put a spell on the Monster Blood when Evan and Andy brought it home. She bewitched it so that it would drive Evan away, or kill him in the process. Why? Because Kathryn herself is also bewitched. She is under the control of Sarabeth, her pet cat, who is actually an evil shape shifting witch who has been dominating Kathryn for decades, and wanted Evan gone because she feared Evan would find out.

It's all sort of unfortunate because Evan is as thick as a stack of bricks and would never have noticed if Sarabeth didn't send the Monster Blood after him. So that, and the pony sized Trigger, become Sarabeth's undoing, and the Monster Blood ultimately consumes her, undoing all her magic and ending her reign of terror over Kathryn. It is a twist that comes out of nowhere, feels completely out of place, makes no sense, and makes everybody involved seem like kind of a dunce. It also immediately creates a lot of questions and narrative inconsistencies that the book never bothers to answer.

I can't help but feel that whole summary reads as kind of dry and boring, but in my defence, that's what the book is. So far, the Goosebumps books I have read all have a similar narrative pace, and that pace is a slow burning fuse on a tonne of dynamite. The books start slow, drip feeding you spooky scenes, fake-outs, and foreshadowing, then it all comes to a sudden climactic peak of frantic and tense action and confrontation with the horror.

But 'Monster Blood' falls flat by being not scary or tense at all. In 'Welcome To Dead House' the first and second act are slow, and not much really happens, and there's a lot of quiet mystery about the house and the town, but that mystery presents as spooky ghost children and mysterious voices from the closet.

In 'Monster Blood' it's just dull scene after dull scene of Evan watching the Monster Blood grow bigger and nothing else happening.

But that's not even the biggest problem I have with 'Monster Blood'.

The biggest problem is that I had to spend 130 pages with Evan Ross, who may just be the most unlikeable protagonist in any book I have ever read. This little shit is ungrateful, judgmental, and condescending to everyone around him. He is utterly miserable from the first pages. While Andy is a delight - funny, caring, honest, personable, assertive - Evan seems to go out of his way to bring her down. Really, Andy deserves a better friend and Kathryn deserves a better nephew.

I hated every moment I had to spend with Evan. 0/10. Would not recommend. Would not inhabit his point of view again.

And yet...

And yet I do feel a touch of sympathy for Evan.

Evan may have opened the can of Monster Blood, may have wilfully bought it and played with it, but he didn't create it. He didn't set it upon the world to grow, consume, and destroy. Evan was a victim. But worse yet, for a long time, Evan was the only one who could see that the Monster Blood was an issue.

Kathryn doesn't believe him. Andy, for a long time, thinks it's maybe weird but no big deal - or at least not her problem. There's a scene in which Evan takes Trigger to the vet and the vet, seeing this over sized dog, declares it to be unusual but perfectly healthy. The vet runs some tests, but decides to wait and see if there's anything to actually worry about.

In a way, for a lot of the story, Evan is very much alone in conflict with this terrifying unnatural force of destruction set on infinitely growing and consuming everything it touches.

And here in the year of our lord, 2020, I suspect there's a lot of people who can relate to that.

And those people are Marxists.

Yes, it's that time.

When I first mentioned that I was considering reading all the Goosebumps books, I was asked for the Marxist take on Monster Blood. Why Monster Blood specifically? No clue. But here we are.

If you didn't pick up on the very subtle analogy I was crafting above, the Monster Blood bears some striking and frightening similarities this capitalist hellscape we've all come to understand as the world we live in. Its only goal is to grow and consume, and the only way it can do that is to destroy everything it touches, to treat nature, people, objects all alike as food. And it doesn't matter that Evan opened the can, that Kathryn set its growth in motion, that Sarabeth thought she was in control of it - all of them would ultimately suffer as the Monster Blood's victims. Likewise, it didn't matter that Andy and the Beymer twins really had nothing to do with it, that they were bystanders. Everybody. Everybody is in the Monster Blood's destructive path.

And Evan knew. And he tried to warn everyone. He was the first to suffer. He was the proletariat at the receiving end of exploitation, understood what was happening to him, saw what would happen to all, and tried to warn the world of the terrible future ahead.

In the year of our lord 2020, we can now see that the end game of the class struggle is the destruction of the planet. Capitalist exploitation and the pursuit of infinite growth will not only continue to cost the workers their lives, it will inevitably turn back on the capitalists and destroy them. All the wealth in the world won't save them. They can own every piece of property on Earth and none of it will mean a thing when the Earth is a dry, burnt, lifeless husk. In class war, there are no victors.

And maybe, just maybe, the only solution here is revolution. We Marxists must unite as... A giant bewitched dog... And we must crash tackle a shape-shifting capitalist witch into a blob monster... You know. The blob monster that is Capitalism and that's... Currently threatening our deaf great-aunt who... I guess is... Middle-management? Also, now she can lip read, even though we made a big deal of how she couldn't before?

And then after the revolution, Andy... Who I think is, like, a politically unengaged liberal... Wants to take a piece of the capitalism home as a souvenir but when she goes to pick it up, it has mysteriously vanished...

Okay, fine. Look, it's not a perfect metaphor. What do you want from me?

'Monster Blood' is a boring book with a miserable protagonist in which nothing happens for too long, and when it finally does happen, it's a farcical non-sequitur both narratively and tonally. Sure, I can make a Marxist analogue out of anything, but even Bob Ross would produce an occasional sub-par landscape if all you gave him was a palette of Cadmium Yellow Shit.

Whatever. I'm going to go read 'Say Cheese And Die.'

At least I never have to read a book about Monster Blood ever again...