Bumping Geese The Final Chapter: A Tale of Two Novels

You may have noticed that I haven't enjoyed the last few Goosebumps Books I've read. I did something different, this week. I skipped the next Goosebumps book, something called 'Deep Trouble' and read book 20, 'The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight'. And then, to mix things up, I read another book. But more on that later.

This is a Goosebumps Book

Scarecrows, as I'm sure you know, are cool. And spoopy. They're not terrifying like human-plant monsters. They're not totally fuckin' rad like Werewolves. They're just cool. And, as a subject of horror, tragically underused. I don't know what 'Deep Trouble' is about. Hopefully the name isn't some kind of pun suggesting horrors in the depths of the ocean, because the depths of the ocean are also terrifying and maybe I shouldn't have skipped it. But, in any case, I did.

And I read this instead.

'The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight' concerns Jodie, who loves to visit her grandparents' farm. She and her brother Mark visit on the regular. They love their grandmother's pancakes for breakfast and they love their grandfather's scary stories by the fire in the evening. It does sound like a pretty sweet deal. Their farmhand, Stanley, is a little weird, but they don't mind him. The worst part might be Stanley's son Sticks, who isn't a bad person, they just don't get on so well. But this time, things at the farm are all wrong!

Their grandmother only makes cornflakes for breakfast, their grandfather claims he doesn't know any scary stories, both of them seem to be showing a weird deference or even fear towards Stanley. Sticks warns them that things at the farm are different now and tells them to leave. When they don't, Sticks starts dressing up as a scarecrow and jumping out at them, or moving the scarecrows around at night to try and scare them. Stanley, in his usual oddity, has become obsessed with a book of superstitions he owns.

The visit is, to say the least, a disappointment. And Sticks insists he's not dressing up as a scarecrow at all.

Now, at this point, I thought there were two twists that might be revealed in this book. Either Stanley has brought the scarecrows to life with his magic book and has taken the farm hostage to his whims, or Stanley has turned Jodie's grandparents into scarecrows and turned scarecrows into grandparent simulacrum and is ruling the farm as magical dictator for life. I hoped it'd be the second one, because that'd be a cool twist that the scarecrows weren't trying to hurt Jodie and Mark, but were really their grandparents trying to communicate.

Turns out it's the first one. Kind of. Stanley did bring the scarecrows to life, but started to lose control and had to undo his spell, but first he made Jodie's grandparents to do things his way - no more pancakes or scary stories - or he'd bring them back. Well, Stanley failed to undo the spell properly and then, worse, brings all the scarecrows to life again in a moment of panic. But Sticks had a plan for just this occasion, and saves the day by setting the scarecrows on fire and burning them to death.

All in all, pretty cool. And that makes sense. Scarecrows are pretty cool. Good use of scarecrows, R L Stine. Well done.

This is not a Goosebumps book

After reading Goosebumps #20, I decided to try out the first book in the Fear Street series. Fear Street was RL Stine's young adult horror series written in the 90s. Much like Goosebumps, they have cover art that I absolutely fucking love.

Fear Street #1 'The New Girl' is about Corey, a sixteen year old star gymnast and all around super boring protagonist. He is oblivious to the obvious romantic overtures his neighbour and long-time friend Lisa has been making towards him, but otherwise his life is going okay. Then he catches sight of The New Girl, a beautiful blonde girl with a classic beauty and old world fashion style... Which I think means she wears dresses.

Sure. Why not.

Anyway, Corey becomes so obsessed thinking about the New Girl and trying to find her, that his friendships start to fall apart and he pushes Lisa away and screws up all his gymnast routines in practice and during competitions. His obsession is compounded by the mystery surrounding the new girl. None of his friends have noticed her, she's often absent from school for days at a time, and when Corey does catch sight of her, she seems to vanish the moment he looks away. Only Lisa notices her. Lisa knows her name is Anna and they share a class together, but Lisa too notices Anna missing a lot of school.

Eventually Corey does talk to Anna, and the two begin to develop a relationship that isn't quite romantic but is kind of fucked up. Corey convinces a telephone operator to give him Anna's phone number and address, but when Corey calls (or shows up unannounced) he is told by Anna's family that Anna is dead. Corey breaks into the school's permanent records and finds no file for Anna. Then one night, Anna calls Corey and asks for help, asks him to come to her house. He does, and there they share their first kiss., but Anna also explains that her brother Brad is crazy and wants to kill her. Then she runs away. And shit continues to get weird. Soon, Corey notices Brad following him and/or Anna.

Then Lisa turns up an old newspaper article from last year with an obituary for Anna.

Things rapidly escalate after Lisa asks Corey to the upcoming school dance. Lisa finds a dead cat in her locker and at the dance, somebody pushes Lisa down a flight of stairs. Lisa is sure Anna is the culprit - jealous and possessive of Corey. Corey is convinced Brad, murderous and furious, is the culprit.

This pot of violence and romance and madness all boils over in the final chapters of the novel when Corey goes to confront Brad at Brad and Anna's home and arrives just in time to see Brad and Anna locked in battle. Corey knocks Brad out and tries to take Anna away, but Anna grabs a knife and insists they must finish Brad off.

Corey realises he done fucked up.

Brad wakes up, helps Corey subdue Anna, and then explains that Anna isn't Anna at all. Anna is Willa. The real Anna - Brad and Willa's sister - did die, and Brad has always suspected Willa killed her. Willa is just, apparently, batshit bananas, and has been pretending to be Anna to... Well, to be honest, I'm not sure what her end game was. Possibly to kill Brad and stop him from being the only thing stopping her reign of maniacal terror?

Honestly, it doesn't matter. She's deranged and dangerous and they call the police and Corey gets on with his life, finally recognising his mutual feelings for Lisa.

So the end is a bit vague. Or it's possible I just forgot. I read like five books this week, so it's possible those details didn't stick. I don't know. You read the book and tell me.

And if it sounds like an interesting book and you like young adult fiction and horror stories, then yeah, I recommend read it. It's fine. It has some of those stylistic choices of RL Stine's that I don't like. For example, he still repeats some scenes too much. They're not bad scenes or even pointless. I see what purpose they serve and they're written fine, it's just that I'm an impatient reader. I read these repetitions and think "Yeah, thanks, I get it. I know what you are saying."

So it's fine. And why wouldn't it be fine? RL Stine is a solid writer with an excellent grasp of horror conventions. Oh, and there are a couple of actual jokes in there. Funny ones. Given an older audience and, with it, the capacity for deeper characters, higher stakes, more complex plots, RL Stine delivers above expectation. Good stuff. Solid effort. Recommended for the teenaged horror fan in your life.

All right. Let's get to the meat of the issue.

Why am I talking about Fear Street? Why did I skip Goosebumps #19? Why is this blog called "The Final Chapter"?

Well, I'll tell you.

No more of this

I don't want to be the Nostalgia Critic.

It has always been my practice to not publicly review books. I make some exceptions when I absolutely love a book, but I hold this commitment as doubly important if I have nothing good to say about a book. I feel it is professionally inappropriate at best and deeply petty at worst. And if those fellow authors happen to be, by any metric, several thousand times more successful than I am, it's a real bad look.

It has always been my stance that authors have a responsibility to build each other up. It's kind of a hell industry and we need all the support and encouragement we can get, and the best place to get that is from each other. Bumping Geese has become a gross failure to live up to that ideal.

I genuinely thought I'd enjoy Goosebumps more than I have. The first couple of books really reaffirmed that expectation. But when more and more books are just not what I'm after, and I've committed to writing about it, the best I can do is try and make that writing entertaining. But I can only be performatively and irrationally angry at children's books in so many ways for so long before the joke gets old. For you and for me.

It's not even a great joke to begin with.

Plus, I run the risk of making you believe that a bad Goosebumps book actually matters, or that RL Stine is a bad writer.

Fuck, you know what, I'm going to stop saying "bad Goosebumps" because, really, who the fuck am I to judge?

I am in my 30s. I am a horror nerd who has been reading horror fiction and watching horror movies for years. I am not the audience for these books. The fact that I enjoyed any of them - that I found any of them genuinely frightening - should be seen as enormous praise for what RL Stine is capable of as a writer.

So this is it. The great Goosebumps experiment comes to an end. I liked most of them. I didn't like some of them. If you have children, they'll probably like them more than me. Hell, you might like them more than me. You can read them.

Or read Fear Street. I'll probably check out some more of those.

But you won't hear about it from me if I do.

So I hope you've enjoyed this experiment. I hope you learned a little about something - whether it was Existentialism, Marxism, the craft of story telling, or just that spoopy books for kids are pretty cool. And if you didn't... Well, you're probably not reading this, so I've no reason to keep justifying myself to you.

Bumping Geese 18: Monster Blood II

 You people sicken me.

Blog readers only want one thing and it's fucking disgusting.

Well it's not happening. The monkey isn't dancing for your entertainment today. You'll have to get your sick kicks somewhere else.

And you want to know why? Just look at this!

This is what you want, isn't it, you sick freak!

Do you see that? Do you know what that says? Right there?

It says 'Monster Blood II'.

And yeah, I read it. I read the whole thing. Cover to cover. And no, I'm not going to tell you about it. I'm not going through this again. Do you remember the last time I read a 'Monster Blood' book? The first really bad Goosebumps book. And now here we are again and you want to know, you're just chomping at the bit for me to say "Yes, Evan Ross returns as the protagonist in this book and yes, he's still the absolute worst."

But I'm not doing that. You'll just have to live in the knowledge that I resisted. I was too strong. And you'll say "Please please tell me the plot?" Hoping I'll say something like "Set some months after the first, Evan Ross is settled in his new home in Atlanta and is at a new school and he tried to tell everybody about Monster Blood and they all thought he was crazy and nobody likes him and the bully Conan Barber - nicknamed Conan the Barbarian - is very dull and trite bully stereotype ever invented hates Evan almost as much as his teacher Mr Murphy and about half as much as I do."

But that's not happening. That's not how this goes. I'm on strike. So you don't get details. You don't get to know about Andy making a sudden, barely justified return to the story, or that she brings Monster Blood with her under the most contrived and half-assed circumstances, or that she feeds it to Mr Murphy's pet hamster Cuddles, or that this - despite being the cover of the book - doesn't happen until literally half way through the book and that before that, for an entire half the novel NOT A SINGLE FUCKING INTERESTING THING OCCURS IN THE PAGES OF THIS SPOOPY CHILDREN'S NOVEL.

And sure, if I told you any of that, you might understand my frustration. You'd say "It's okay, you've said enough. You don't need to go through this again." But it'd be lies, wouldn't it? You're so duplicitous. But I'm onto you. You'll smile and pat me on the back and say "There, there. That's okay. Let's talk about something else," but really you expect the dam to have broken by this point. Deep down in the black pit you have for a heart, you're hoping I'll say "No! No! I've started now, I might as well get it out!" and I'll tell you all about how Cuddles gets bigger, and Mr Murphy is angry and then excited and Evan wants to stop it and Andy thinks its funny and then Cuddles breaks free, gets bigger than a person, and tries to eat people, and Evan eats some Monster Blood, too, so he'll grow giant and then he wrestles Cuddles but Cuddles, the hamster, somehow out wrestles Evan.

So, no, I'm not playing into your hand. If I start now, if I tell you even a single thing about this book, it won't be long before I tell you that this terrible book has a terrible ending in which, when all seems lost, all the Monster Blood dries up and Evan and Cuddles pop back to normal size because THE MONSTER BLOOD REACHES ITS EXPERIATION DATE.

And maybe I'd remark that this twist - the one I'm not going to share with you - is a little funny, but requires you do not think about continuity at all, and isn't that just a massive implied insult to the reader?

So, you see, you might as well go about your day. You don't get your sick kicks, today. I'm not going to tell you a single thing about this book. You want to know so badly? Go read it yourself. Go write your own blog. You can call it 'Gumping Beese' or something. You can suffer for the cheers of strangers. And then, maybe you can use it as an opportunity to teach a literary or philosophical concept like, fuck, I don't know.

Dramatic irony.

You know dramatic irony? The literary technique in which the audience is granted more information than a character in the text. For example, a character might insist that they will not do a thing and remain stubborn in their refusal, but you as the audience, have the knowledge that the character is unwittingly doing all those very things they have sworn not to do. This would be an example of dramatic irony used for comedy, but the same basic idea could be used for horror or suspense or tragedy.

But that's up to you. Because I'm not doing it. I'm not doing any of it. That's it. I'm done. Maybe I'll tell you about the next one, but I will take the details of 'Monster Blood II' with me to the grave.

Bumping Geese 17: Why I'm Afraid of Bees

Albert Camus said, and I'm paraphrasing, the only important philosophical question is the question of suicide. Should we go on living?

I can't answer that for you. But here at the dawn of a new year, I pose a similar question. The great philosophical question of Goosebumps. Should we go on reading Goosebumps?

And at their core, they are the same question. Should one live or kill themself, should one read Goosebumps or... kill themself? For if life has no meaning, then surely the act of reading Goosebumps has no meaning, and if reading Goosebumps is meaningless, then it can only mean that Goosebumps books themselves are meaningless.

And yet the act of reading anything is the endeavour to find meaning. With each page, we search for a meaning that may or may not be there, just as we live each day frantically scrounging for a meaning in life that we may never find.

And this is what philosophers call the Absurd. The search for meaning in the absence of meaning - or, at the very least, the absence of the assurance of meaning, depending on whether you're more of a Camus or a Kierkegaard about it.

But is life and Goosebumps meaningless? Is our failure to find meaning the same as there being no meaning, or is that just a fault in our perceptions? Perhaps, in the absence of tangible meaning, we need to undertake a new exercise.

Let's not look for meaning, but instead, let's look for signs of the absence of meaning. Does life or Goosebumps present us with an absence of proof of meaning, or a proof of absence of meaning? Well, that's a big ask on the topic of life for one small blog, so let's instead focus on Goosebumps.

After all, as we've established, what is true of Goosebumps vis a vis meaning can be said to be true of life. The question of suicide is the question of Goosebumps.

So then, let's look at this week's Goosebumps, starting with the cover art and ask: does this confirm the Absurd?

Huh...

Yeah... I guess that kind of settles that.

Looks pretty definitive to me.

So here we are, at the start of January, the fresh faced year of our Lord 2022 asking the one truly, staring at the Absurd, forced to reason with the break-down of the illusion of meaning and purpose. And now that we have satisfied that all important philosophical question of Goosebumps, as Camus demands we must, we come naturally to the following great question of philosophy:

The fuck did I just read?

'Goosebumps #17: Why I'm Afraid of Bees' is perhaps one of the great works of Absurdist fiction. It is equal parts Kafka and Camus, presented as a horror by way of Cronenberg. A lesser critic might call it derivative, but such an approach would only misunderstand not only the intent of the novel but the context in which it exists - ie. a world devoid of meaning. To be derivative suggests that 'Why I'm Afraid of Bees' is taking from something that it does not own, but as the book demonstrates time and time again, nobody owns anything. Your life, your body, your feelings, none of them are you or belong to you.

Gary 'Lutz The Klutz' Lutz - the name no doubt a reference to the famous 'Amityville Horror' series, further cementing this as a work that bears its lineage like its heart on its sleeve - leads a miserable life. We see his day-to-day world as one of suffering. He is bullied, mocked, and isolated by his family and peers, and even animals routinely attack him. Gary does nothing to bring it on himself. There is no karma or cosmic order demanding his suffering. It is simply the life he lives. And since he can find no comfort anywhere in his existence, he only wishes to escape it. Gary wants out of life.

Gary, like many Absurdist protagonists, is faced with torment without reason and has recognised that there is nothing to be gained by enduring it. He has recognised the absence of meaning in his life.

Escape comes for Gary in the form of a 'Person-to-Person Vacation' service that allows him to swap bodies for a week with another person. Gary signs up for the service, and the service finds him a match who wants to swap bodies with him. But during the transfer process, one of Gary's neighbour's bees climbs into the mind-transfer machinery and Gary finds himself stuck as a bee.

Gary has many shenanigans as a bee, all driven by the need to return to his original body and the life he left behind. Along the way he interacts with his sister's pet cat, a variety of insects, his family, his neighbour, the bee hive he now belongs to, and Dirk, the child who has taken Gary's body. Almost all of these encounters are hostile and Gary is nearly killed a dozen times. Eventually Gary is able to communicate with Ms Karmen, the woman who works for the vacation service, but she explains that Dirk is refusing to give up Gary's body and so she cannot help him. She then accidentally locks Gary in her office where he may well starve to death.

Eventually Gary confronts Dirk and tries to force him to hand over his body by tricking the hive into swarming Dirk-Gary. Caught up in his rage and hatred, Gary commits the one bee act he had sworn never to do: he stings Dirk. This spells Gary's end. A bee cannot sting a person and live.

Dying slowly, Gary flies out into is back yard to die under the maple tree, in his favourite spot to rest as a human. But when Gary awakens, he is human again. Why? How?

Such pedestrian questions about continuity and reason rightfully go unanswered. One might engage with the dying-under-the-tree moment as a metaphor for Gary reconnecting with his humanity by finding the one thing that, in human life, made him happy.

But let me remind you:

This book has no meaning. 

There is no metaphor. And while the final moments see Gary rejoicing to be back with his family, showering them with affection, even befriending Dirk (who is back in his own body) before sticking his face in a flower to suck up some pollen, you will no doubt feel the temptation to see this as a parable about appreciating your life, do not give into that temptation.

There is no reason for Gary's change. The things that made his life torment as a human continued to make his life torment as a bee. Gary's arc defies narrative tradition. It defies reason.

Because there is no reason.

There is no meaning.

And do we ever learn why Gary is afraid of bees? No. The book begins with Gary afraid of bees. He is afraid of bees during the book - and the most genuinely frightening moment in the book is when Gary is forced into the hive and is crowded antenna-to-antenna with bees - and at the end of the book, he no longer fears bees, but feels kinship with them. As a bee, he failed to live as one of them, now comfortably emulates one as a human. He promises to visit them at the hive.

Gary isn't afraid of bees.

The book's title is a lie.

No matter what angle you try to view this novel, it defies understanding and rationalising. It has no purpose. There is no meaning beneath the words.

'Goosebumps #17: Why I'm Afraid of Bees' is the Absurd made manifest.

And so what do we do with that? How do we live in a world where Goosebumps - and thus life - has no meaning?

Well Albert Camus had an idea, and Gary Lutz lives up to Camus' ideal of an Absurd Hero. Without any impetus, without any reason, Gary at the end of the story is happy. He has embraced this wild random life of suffering and body horror and against all rationality, decided to be happy, decided to do what makes him happy. And in Gary's case, that's sticking his nose in flowers and slurping up pollen. Does it make sense?

No. But why would it? Why should it? Sense and reason are what demanded that we search for meaning in the first place, and the universe can only deny us that. So live senselessly. Rebel against your reason, rebel against the meaninglessness of your life, and live without purpose. Anything you might choose to define your life is ultimately, equally worthless, which only means they're all equally worthwhile. There are no right answers, so answer anyway you like. That is Camus' and R.L Stine's answer to that great important question of suicide.

The rational answer is death. The irrational answer is happiness.

Embrace the Absurd. Embrace meaninglessness. Embrace happiness.

Alternatively, it might just not be a very good book...