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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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