This was a really short one-shot so it didn’t have a lot of space to stretch out and build any sort of ambiance (not that ambiance is Stine‘s strength), but it did do something I liked:⁠
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A girl is at camp and she feels like she’s had enough vague threats and weird occurrences and she calls her parents to come pick her up.⁠
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And they COME!⁠
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I mean, she let everyone know that they were coming so the bad guy had to move up the timetable, but I like the effort anyway. Any other Stine book and they would have said “weird how people keep dying and I’m being chased by something I don’t know, but mom would be so disappointed in me if I came home early from camp...“

This was a fun one. Fun and fast.

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I generally like Stine’s longer standalones. They’re usually a good time.

This one’s a bit of a mess, though.

There’s a lot of head hopping, but it doesn’t happen between chapters so it’s easy to catch and you bounce between first and third-person for LONG stretches that probably would have been clearer if Stine used italics like King does to tell you were in the character’s head.

Meanwhile, Stine tries to write the worst character and does a decent job of writing a shallow, materialistic girl.

But it’s funny how time changes how you read something, right?

I read this as a kid and thought she was the worst. Then I read it as an adult and just saw a poor kid whose dad abandoned her, leaving her with a lot of trust issues for people and clinging to material objects because they will never go out for smokes and never come back.

This girl may be a villain, but she still needs therapy.

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As a kid I read a LOT of RL Stine. I started with Goosebumps, moved to Fear Street, then his stand-alone novels, and then, unfortunately, his adult novel.

And beyond the adult novel, “Superstitious” - which I seem to remember having VERY awkward sex scenes - this is the book I remember the best.

Because this book is bananas.

Not in a bad way. During this re-read, I have been less than hospitable to Stine and my own memories because a LOT of them don’t hold up but this is just as bananas and FUN as I remember.

The idea of coming home to your parents being missing is intriguing. As a teenager, you’re in that awkward stage where you know a lot of what’s going on and you know people should be listening to you and treating you seriously but everyone is hung up on the idea that you’re still a kid.

Because you are! Kind of! It’s an awkward time where you have zero power, aren’t treated seriously, but you aren’t oblivious like a younger kid would be. You see the threats, you know the danger, and you wish someone would listen to you.

It’s weird in the series. A protagonist kills a dog (weird in this series), two people die (also weird in the series), and this is before the CULT pops up. The cult that thinks America is on the wrong track and wants to use violence to take over the country and “Make America Great Again.”

Basically.

*shudder*

I never thought I’d say this, but RL Stine CALLED IT in a fuckin’ YA horror novel.

Y’all! Whodathunk?!

Also, there’s a lot of head-hopping between chapters with no chapter names to let you know who’s head you’re in and that slows you down as you figure it out. That’s the worst part of the book, though.

The rest is just a bananas, weird, fun time.

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This is one of the good ones! The story centers on a kid that finds a weird egg during an egg hunt. The egg eventually hatches and a yellow goo-monster comes out.

The kid wants to figure out what the goo monster is so he takes him to a science lab where the scientist says these eggs have been popping up and he’s been keeping them in a cold room so they can stay alive because the heat would kill them.

Which… fine. Goo monsters. Got it.

But then the scientist says he won’t let the kid leave because he wants to study him.

The scientist kidnaps the kid!

The kid’s dad shows up looking for him but the scientist says no, he hasn’t seen any kids recently.

The scientist eventually says he hasn’t decided to kill the kid, the goo monsters attack the doctor, the kid escapes, yadda yadda yadda.

Then the obligatory twist ending that takes all the fear away and bing bang boom: the story.

I liked this one a lot. A whole lot. I hated the twist ending, but I thought Stine did a great job of leaning in on a genuinely scary idea (kidnapping, and not in a particularly fantastic way but just being kidnapped and held by a random adult) without making it TOO scary for the kids.

But I could have absolutely seen him throw caution to the wind and write a story that gave kids way more than just goosebumps with this. If he had taken just a couple things out of this story, extended the timeline, and gave in to a writer’s cruelty they usually have at their disposal (and then not released it in this series), this book could have been fucking terrifying to kiddos just by focusing on being kidnapped, alone, and uncertain about your future.

Even as it is, though, it was still nice to read something with such wild (and close) potential.

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Do you remember how the first Haunted Mask was basically about the power of love?

This isn’t that.

Oh man, but I thought it would be! It was lining itself up SO perfectly for it.

You one of the little bastards from the first book who, for punishment, has to coach a whole team of even smaller little bastards - you know, like what happens at EVERY elementary school, right? A child given the responsibility of being the sole coach to a group of even smaller children? Parents are TOTALLY down for this.

Anyway, he hates these kids and he wants to scare them so he goes to the same place the last girl got her mask (ignoring her warnings) and found this old man mask.

Where the first mask made the girl slowly turn mean, this one just makes him into an old man. Walking becomes a challenge, talking is harder, etc.

And then he sees his team of kids and goes to them.

Now, *I* thought that they would help this old man out while talking about how they give their coach a hard time but that’s only because they feel so comfortable and trust him so much - that they really look up and love him.

Nope. They fucked right off.

This kid goes through the expected agony and the love trick from the first one doesn’t work for him.

Bummer.

What DOES work is reuniting the mask with its matching suit.

Logic.

At which point the whole suit and mask come to life and boogies out of the building like a character of Thunderbirds (the puppet show).

I think it’s a really weak book BUT I actually think it might be the best sequel so far in the series.

…Yup. Pretty sure. What else was there? Slappy? Come on. Monster Blood? Ugh - hell no.

No, this is the best one so far.

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It’s critical to know that RL Stine said he wrote a Goosebumps book in, on average, 1-2 weeks. Some books took six days, some took two weeks.

“Like factory work,” he says.

This is critical. Even if you ignore allegations that he had ghostwriters and don’t consider how much of the final product was them vs Stine, this is still pretty important information because it means that my chief complaint of Goosebumps - that the truly interesting/creepy parts of stories are ignored like they’re nothing in favor of cheap jokey scares - might just be on accident and not just bad writing.

Take this book: The story centers around a haunted school play that was attempted once ages ago but a kid went missing during the performance via a trapdoor in the stage. All evidence of the play was destroyed except for one script so they obviously decided to do the play.

A mysterious kid shows up and wants to be part of the play, the trapdoor on the stage is still there despite about 70 years between play attempts and they’re “refurbishing” it.

The kids investigate the STAGE’S trapdoor which leads to underground tunnels (of course), and they run into the night janitor who runs them off.

Hijinks ensue. The new kid that wants to perform in the haunted play is (brace yourself) the ghost of the kid who fell through the trapdoor and died the first time. Weird how he went missing and they never found the body.

Whatever.

The INTERESTING story is how the “night janitor” wasn’t a janitor at all but a guy who lost his job and was living underground because he was homeless. He kept trying to scare them away from his makeshift home because he was embarrassed but they kept returning.

The idea of a bad guy pushed into the role by the flaws of society and then kids who wouldn’t leave him alone is interesting to me but we don’t get much of THAT because of the predictable A-story here.

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