SEASON'S READINGS: WEIRDO HALLOWEEN

Let me start this post with a tragic confession: I read just one Goosebumps book when I was a kid. It was titled You Can’t Scare Me! and featured some awesome swamp monsters on the cover.  My parents bought it for me at a local bookshop during a day trip to Carmel.  To say my family was big on reading is about as under an understatement that you can make but, as with television (no Simpsons, no Roseanne) and food (no fast food and just one piece of Halloween candy a day!), my mom had standards for books.  We were still in the car driving home when she had a fit of buyer’s remorse and informed me that this was the first and last Goosebumps book I’d be reading.

You always remember your first.

So I lived out the rest of childhood lustily staring at the (amazing!) covers of my classmates’ Goosebumps books.  I later watched the live-action show, absorbing many of the storylines that way, but a Goosebumps-sized hole stayed with me for years.  A couple of years ago I decided to make up for lost time and started getting the books from the library.  I tend to read them mostly in October but occasionally I’ll indulge in a summer camp themed installment (of which there are many) in June or July.  A Halloween-themed Goosebumps book is an even greater treat—it’s like the cronut of 90s kid lit (not that I’ve actually had a cronut, but you get my drift).

I’ve already read both Attack of the Jack O’Lanterns and The Haunted Mask so this year I turned to Weirdo Halloween.  Weirdo Halloween is a relatively recent addition to the mythos, part of an offshoot series focused around HorrorLand.  About 99% of the Goosebumps appeal is in the cover art so let me take a moment and examine it.  We’ve got an orange midget alien and a giant bag of Halloween candy.  Perfection! 

Approved!

As for the story… eh, not so much.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have particularly high standards when it comes to books written for an 8 year old demographic.  But a lot of them are surprisingly good even if way too many suffer from the whole “everyone is an alien!” twist ending.  Seriously, a lot of the books end with people turning out be aliens.  Weirdo Halloween promised aliens from the cover onward, however, so I knew what I was getting.

Our heroine Meg is of the typical, personality-free Goosebumps variety, along with her equally cipher-like brother.  En route to a friend’s Halloween party they help free a costumed kid trapped in a bush.  Later the party is mysteriously stink-bombed (it gets weirder).  When they return home the kid from the bush, who is actually—wait for it—an alien named Bim from the planet Weirdo shows up.  He says he stink-bombed the party as a sign of his gratitude and is now staying by their side FOREVER. 

Bim goes from annoying to psychotic, destroying Meg’s precious doll collection and forcing her to give him backrubs in a very creepy, molesty manner.  Really, there are detailed descriptions of her hands on his scaly, lumpy skin as he demands “more back rubs!”   Bim also regurgitates a partially-digested dead squirrel.  And then comes the book’s most horrifying moment: he sticks a piece of dead squirrel flesh IN HER MOUTH.  Yeah, I don’t get it either but I assure you it was disgusting.

Eventually the kids and their elderly babysitter Penny (the best character by far) drive Bim off first by insulting him repeatedly (it makes him shrink) and then reuniting him with his lost toy, which is why he was on Earth in the first place.  The end… or is it?

It’s not.  Weirdo Halloween is labeled a “Special Edition” meaning it’s twice the size of your average Goosebumps book.  So the ghostwriter (I’m assuming it’s a ghostwriter, anyway), rather than just write a longer story, has poor Meg get rid of Bim only to be randomly teleported to HorrorLand and engage in a totally unrelated second adventure.  Now she has to chase her brother and her evil twin doppelganger around the creepy amusement park and prove that she is the real Meg.  The highlight?  Meg and her evil twin almost drown in a giant pumpkin pie, complete with whipped cream.  After taking care of her evil twin Meg returns home only to find… her evil twin!  The last line is “How did you get in my room?”

The ending was so abrupt I thought I had a defective copy that was missing some pages but nope, that’s it.  Whoever wrote this just ran out of steam and I can’t really blame them; after coming up with a drowning via giant pumpkin pie anyone’s brain would be understandably drained.

 Read It, Skip It, Own It?

You can't really go wrong with a Goosebumps book; even at their worst they are a fun diversion.  But since there are so, so many books in the series to choose from you can skip this one in favor of one of the better Halloween offerings such as Attack of the Jack O’Lanterns or The Haunted Mask.