And now, the finale of our first ever official
And this week we're finishing with what I understand to be the last of the most iconic Goosebumps books, one so emblematic of the series that it was chosen as the two-part pilot for the TV series, and one of the handful of books to receive sequels. I'm far from the first to opine on this book, and I'll surely not be the last. But I'll do it anyway and you can't stop me.
'The Haunted Mask' is the story of Carly Beth, just your usual young girl Goosebumps book protagonist. She lives in the suburbs or a small town, has a best friend, a younger brother, a stay-at-home mother, a working father, and a completely ordinary life until the events of the book transpire. No pet, though, which is unusual. What is also unusual is that a chunk of this book takes place while Carly Beth is at school. Most, if not all the books so far, have either skipped over school hours to take place on weekends and week nights, or have taken place during a holiday period (usually summer break), so we don't see the protagonists at school.
What it completely unexceptional, however, is that Carly Beth is surrounded by just the worst people. Total trash. All her friends? Garbage people.
Not, like, people who collect garbage as a job, but people who are made of garbage.
I mean, they're not, like, actually literally made of garbage. They're just terrible people.
What makes them terrible is that they have all come to learn that Carly Beth is something of a meek child, very easily frightened, very nervous, and they have decided this is the funniest thing in the world. Her friends - which is a generous term - Chuck and Steve in particular like to do things like trick her into thinking a spider is biting her leg, and they do this while Carly Beth is giving her presentation at the school science fair. Other greatest hits include offering her a sandwich that they have put a worm in, and not telling her until after she has eaten half of it. Then telling her the worm is fake to calm her down, until she investigates it and confirms it is real.
You know, what garbage humans like to call "pranks" and the rest of us call "being awful".
Carly Beth's best friend Sabrina is less involved, but always encouraging of their friends scaring Carly Beth, and dismissive of Carly Beth's fears and frustrations and really just all of her emotions. Sabrina is the sort of person who would burn down your house and then wouldn't talk to you until you apologised for getting mad at her over "a joke."
I'm not saying Sabrina or Chuck or Steve are worse people than Lindy Powell, but characters likes these really make you appreciate the sophistication and cunning of a sociopath like Lindy.
Anyway. After being pushed too far just once too often, Carly Beth gets it into her head to get her own revenge by scaring her friends on Halloween. She takes a last minute trip to a party shop to buy the scariest mask she can, and while browsing, comes across a back room in the store full of the most realistic and most disturbing masks - the perfect frightening masks for her plan. The store owner is hesitant to sell them, but she convinces him and hands over her life savings ($30) for the mask, then sets out to begin her reign of terror.
She starts with her brother, Noah, and scares him when she gets home. It works a treat, and Carly Beth discovers that inside the mask, her voice takes on a sinister growly pitch. It's not a comfortable mask to wear, though. It smells awful, makes her sweat, and is kind of sticky.
Carly Beth rounds out her costume by taking a plaster sculpture of her face (made by her mother in an art class) and sticking it on the end of a broom handle, and carries it as though it were a head on a pike. Now set, she dashes off into the eerie Halloween night to spread fear and terror.
And she does.
We have a montage of Carly Beth scaring some random tick-or-treaters, and her friend Sabrina, and then literally anybody else she runs into. And although none of the adults she meets are afraid, she gives them the same angry and growling treatment she gives everybody else, and claims she is just "in character". Carly Beth has the time of her life jumping out of bushes and roaring at children. When she gets tired of Sabrina's reservations about their mischief, Carly Beth runs off to bring vengeance on the town by herself. She steals somebody's trick-or-treat bag. She throws apples at a house. And finally she meets Chuck and Steve and terrorises them, demanding their bags and threatening to take their heads just like she did to Carly Beth. Chuck and Steve are put off but do their best to remain strong, until, as Carly Beth thrusts her head-on-a-stick at them, all three see the plaster sculpture come to life and plead for help. Chuck and Steve go running and Carly Beth, the real... the maybe real Carly Beth gets such a fright of her own she tosses it aside.
But that only lasts a minute. Once it dawns on her that she has frightened her friends and accomplished her goals, she goes for a mad run around the streets and howls at the night sky. It seems her transformation from meek and frightened girl to something scary, something powerful, is complete. And for Carly Beth, despite a lingering doubt that maybe this is all a bit much, revels in her Halloween shenanigans.
About this time, Sabrina finds her and the two decide to call it a night and go home to sort through their Halloween loot. But when Carly Beth tries to take off her mask, she discovers it has become fused to her body. She and the mask are now one. There is no seam, no space between her flesh and the skin-like mask snug on her face. Carly Beth rushes out into the streets again, this time in a panic, and tries in vain to hide her hideous new face. This desperate flight brings her back to the party store, where the store owner once again welcomes her inside. He explains that he thought she might come back, that he expected this would happen. For the mask is not a mask at all, but a strange life form he invented in a lab. All the masks in the back room are alive, and were once beautiful, but over time became hideous monstrosities. All they want is a body, and from time to time, somebody comes into the store, finds them, and demands to buy one.
And the book just kind of glosses over how fucked up all this is, but, hey, not everything needs to be explained. In a world in which sentient mask monsters can attach to people's bodies, suspending disbelief on the how and why we got here is a small ask. This shit is crazy enough as it is.
Anyway, for other reasons which aren't explained, the mask can only be removed by a symbol of true love. But it will only work once. Should Carly Beth or anybody else put the mask on again, there will be no separating from it.
I'm sure you can see where this is going. Carly Beth runs back into the streets, now chased by the other masks (because of... more reasons), and finds the sculpture her mother made of her face. Carly Beth is able to free herself of the mask with this and drive away all the other masks chasing her. The nightmare apparently over, she returns home to a worried mother. Carly Beth begins to explain where she has been, why she is home late, why she left without the costume her mother bought her, and why she has the plaster sculpture, but she's only a few words in when her brother Noah bursts into the room snarling and screaming, wearing Carly Beth's monster mask!
So I guess the first thing we have to address here is the ending. It is not one of the better ones. There is good planting and pay off, but a lot of the exposition doesn't really add up, and really just leaves you with more questions instead of fewer. The climactic chase scene comes and goes with barely any escalating of the tension and it's not clear why the masks decide to join in the way they do. I've read that RL Stine comes up with the title and the twist ending for the books first, and then writes around them. And I think sometimes you can see the weakness in that approach. Sometimes I get the impression he has stuck too hard to an original idea and the end result is a little forced.
But it's also far far far from the worst case we've seen. 'The Haunted Mask' isn't, in any sense, bad. It's probably one of the best so far, in fact. Unlike 'Monster Blood', it is worthy of its privileged status as an iconic entry in the series. I look forward to the sequels.
Because ultimately, those are small issues. Noteworthy, but not enough to subtract from the overall quality. This might be the best written book in the series so far. RL Stine goes all in to create a visceral Halloween atmosphere. All the motifs you could want are here: trick-or-treating, jack-o-lanterns, dry autumn leaves, cool winds, and frequent acknowledgements of the bright moon hanging over the town, occasionally vanishing behind clouds in the darker moments of the story. More than any other Goosebumps book before it, this one paints its environment for the reader in beautiful detail.
And it might just be that I have a great fondness for Halloween in all its camp tradition. The German word "fernweh" has been described as not merely wanderlust, but as a "homesickness for somewhere you've never been." We don't have a Halloween tradition in Australia, but I definitely feel a kind of fernweh for it, a second-hand nostalgia. Which also sort of describes this whole Goosebumps reading enterprise we're on. And so 'The Haunted Mask', in addition to being an excellent entry in the series, resonated with me and ticked a lot of my personal boxes in the same way 'Stay Out of The Basement Did'.
And I wonder if that isn't the appeal of the series as a whole? Sure, they're all pretty formulaic, they're all spoopy children's books with generous helpings of comedy and occasionally they are awful. But they're so broad in topic and tone, and increasingly broad in setting, that eventually, if you read enough, you're almost guaranteed to find one or two that fits you perfectly. And those are likely the books that will stick out in your mind.
Every time I sit down to write one of these blogs, I am tempted to rag on 'Monster Blood' some more, because it is a bad book and it does deserve the hate I give it. But when I walk away, when I'm starting the next book, when I'm going through my day, it's the good ones I think about most. 'Stay Out of The Basement', 'Say Cheese and Die', and 'Let's Get Invisible' have all stuck with me because they are genuinely good books. They're scary, they're well written, and they have something to say. And 'The Haunted Mask' is going to join that list.
I know this has been something of a Ramble Review and we've talked about a lot, but there's one more thing I want to say about 'The Haunted Mask' and I feel like I'd be doing you and the novel a disservice if I didn't touch on it briefly.
In my reading about the book and its TV adaptation, I saw a few comments about the book's themes regarding peer pressure and how the story is about Carly Beth learning to love herself as she is. And while those are good messages, with all due respect, I don't think those interpretations carry a lot of weight. At the very least, I don't think it is the strongest or even most interesting reading of the book.
As I read 'The Haunted Mask' I was constantly reminded of two famous quotes*: "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." and "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."
Carly Beth's story is a story of revenge. The transformation she undertakes is the result of her desire to get back at her friends for how they have treated her. That desire is so consuming that it ultimately changes her, inside and out. Her vengeance needed a monster, and so she became that monster, even though a lot more people than Sabrina, Chuck, and Steve suffered for it. Even though Carly Beth herself suffered for it.
One way to look at the conflict in a story is examining what the protagonist wants, compared to what the protagonist needs. Often they are different, and how those tensions are revealed and resolved is a big part of what any story ultimately has to say about the world and the human condition. Carly Beth wanted revenge. What she needed was better people in her life. By the end, she had both. But one - revenge - turned her into a hideous monster that carried her own head on a pike like a trophy, and the other - her family - gave her warm cider at the end of a rough night. And it is that latter resolution, Carly Beth getting what she really needed all along, that delivers on her happy ending (obligatory twist not withstanding) and that's how we know it is her need even though it is never stated in the way her want is.
Some of you may well think this all sounds like a lot of High School English Class bullshit and you wonder why a book can't just be a book. A spooky story about a mask might just be a spooky story about a mask. And that is a whole conversation in itself, but let me just say, as somebody with a level of expertise in writing fiction, these themes and ideas your English teachers and book bloggers like to pry out of stories are put there on purpose.**
Obviously I can't speak for RL Stine specifically, but authors are a clever bunch.
Trust me.
*The former is attributed to Confucius and the second to Buddha. There's no evidence of the former, and the latter is from a later Buddhist writer.
**There is also an argument to be made as to whether or not it even matters if it is deliberate but, again, that's is a whole big conversation in itself.
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