Kids, in honour of the weekend, the best time of the week, I have decided to take you on a little trip down memory lane, back to Elementary School and Library book sales. Back to making coffee for your 8th grade art teacher because you didn't want to go sit alone at recess (oh, maybe that was just me then). That's right; today I give my two cents on the best, the worst, and the downright lame in the world of Goosebumps. Because let's face it - Are You Afraid of the Dark? was just a sub-par Goosebumps rip-off (seriously, how gay was the Midnight Society?) Less do dis!
THE BEST
The Girl who Cried Monster
Honourable mentions: Welcome to Dead House, The Haunted Mask, Becareful What You Wish For, Welcome to Camp Nightmare.
Okay, this book was definately one of the sickest based on one thing: The Red Herring. Many Goosebumps books simply tried to scare you with monsters and mummies and shit, but a truly good Goosebumps book scared the living shit out of you with a freaky twist ending. The Girl who Cried Monster is all about this girl who accidentally catches her school librarian eating weird shit, then running home and telling her parents that he is a monster. He parents are all "sh'eah right, homegirl" and decide to invite him over for dinner to prove her wrong. Turns out, he is a monster. Psyche! Her family invites him over to eat him because THEY are the monsters, and don't want any monsters on their turf. Come on, this is freaky shit for an eleven-year-old.
While the other mentioned don't all have twist endings, they are pretty boss for the following reasons:
Welcome to Dead House - first in the series. Can't leave it out.
The Haunted Mask - she had a Halloween mask permanently affixed to her face!
Be Careful What You Wish for - a mean-ass 12-year-old girl who makes fun of a nerd gets her comeuppance from a gypsy lady. It's like Mean Girls, but...you know...with a gypsy.
Welcome to Camp Nightmare - awesome twist ending. Turns out the summer camp is a training facility for aliens-that-look-identical-to-humans planning to hijack Earth.
THE WORST
Stay Out of the Basement
Honourable mentions: Monster Blood, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, Ghost Beach, The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight.
Okay, when I say 'the worst' what I really mean is 'books that were so boring I couldn't finish them'. Come on, those books were like 50 pages long with 14 pt. type! How could you not finish one? Because it was about a boring-ass scientists who grows boring-ass plants in his boring-ass basement (that I have been advised to stay out of). But seriously? A scary basement writes itself: it's dark, there's cement floors, pipes are rattling, spiders all over the damn place, creepy out-of-date Christmas decorations. You know that scene in Home Alone where Kevin goes into the basement and the furnace seems to be growling at him? Yeah, now add a stupid plant-guy. Congratulations RL Stein, you just went from scary to a biology lecture. Thanks. Here are some more crappy, boring storylines that are mostly guesses since I never finished the book.
Monster Blood - creepy goo that makes things big or weirds them into different stuff. So, basically the plot of The Nutty Professor (also see Monster Blood 2, in which the blood makes a hamster grow into a giant, snarly hamster. I think that may qaulify as Copyright Infringement.)
Curse of the Mummy's Tomb - bla bla bla mummies bla bla bla curses bla bla bla every other fucking story about finding a mummy ever.
Ghost Beach - there's a ghost. There's a beach. And yet? No story about a spooky surfer from the 60's. Lame.
The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight - jesus, what the fuck is a scarecrow going to do? Eat your brains? IT'S A FUCKING SCARECROW!
THE DOWNRIGHT LAME
Piano Lessons can be Murder
Honourable mentions: Go Eat Worms!, Why I'm Afraid of Bees, Night of the Living Dummy, Pretty much the remaining 50 books.
Piano lessons? Piano Lessons?!? You wrote a horror novel about montherfucking piano lessons?!? What, Don't Take out the Trash and The Haunted Laundry didn't appeal to the publisher? Jesus Christ, how lame can you get? The story is about a kid who takes piano lessons on a piano that he found in the attic of his new house. He hears piano playing every night, so you are made to think that the story is going to be all about this goddamned haunted piano. Nope, its about his weird-ass piano teacher. The story goes on to make you think that the piano teacher may be some pedophile or something, but nope. He's a robot. He is saved by the school janitor (because aparently, he takes lessons in the school?) and then it is revealed that the janitor made the teacher-bot. Oookaye. The the janitor is killed by the ghost of the kid's piano. Wow. Thanks. You might as well have just called this one The Tale of the Story Written on RL Stein's Lunchbreak. Other "RL Stein, WTF dude?" stories are:
Go Eat Worms! - some nerd likes dissecting worms and then they try to kill him. A haunting tale of animal cruelty. Or the horrors of being a nerd, I dunno.
Why I'm Afraid of Bees - I'll tell you why I'm afraid of bees. Two words: My Girl.
Night of the Living Dummy - ugh, I hate stories about haunted dummies or haunted dolls or haunted hand puppets, cause I'm always just like "fuck, throw its haunted ass in a fire." Instead, they keep them around and spend the whole story going "oh no! I think Baby Wiggles is haunted! What do we do? I can't throw her out, she's a cherished childhood plaything! But she did kill my parents....what do I do?!?"
MY FAVOURITE COVERS
Goosebumps had some pretty awesome illustrations, eh? Shit, some of them made me scared before I even read the lame description on the back. They also sort of scared me because some poor kid would check it out, take it home, and it would come back with peanut butter all over the bumpy, raised lettering and Coke stains in the pages. Also, once I found a booger between the pages. Shit, alot of kids I went to school with were clearly raised in the garbage.
This was the first and only in a series called RL Stein's really gay monsters.
This one still gives me chills.
I could easily make a Michael Vick joke, but it's Friday and I'm lazy.
Ah, the horrors of masturbation.
I love the kids just chillin in the background. "Fuck Mom, I said no onions in the potato salad!"
"Jeremy, don't talk to your mother that way!"
"YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD, ARTIE!!"
Remember how Adam West was in the TV episode of this one? I also thought that Mark Hamill was in it too, but then I realized I was confusing it with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
"Last one in is a rotten...ghost!"
That gets me evertime. I think Dane Cook used to write the small joke-lines on the Goosebumps covers.