But, before we cover the Bottom 25, we have to cover the last six that didn’t make the list., so let’s get started!
Here are our Dishonourable Mentions:
Say Cheese and Die-- Again! [#44]
Like Part 1 of the evil camera sub-series, this almost made the list - but in this case, the bad list. Nobody at school believes our kid about the evil camera, so he has to get it back to convince his teacher. The writing is alright even if the plot sucks, but this is just a rip-off of the first book - but worse, since they seem to forget how to stop it.
The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena [#038]
This has some good elements, but this story seems to rely too heavily on some weird magic. Some kids go with their dad on a trip to the snow and bring back a frozen monster, but when it thaws it attacks the town. This has a lot of good, but the goofy Goosebumps-y qualities of this are too much to save this story from mediocrity.
Vampire Breath [#49]
Whilst this starts off with a cool premise, the story itself is just... so stupid. Some kids find a tunnel in their basement that leads to a hidden vampire crypt, and get magically transported to a gothic castle. I think this would be great if the kids were fighting a vampire at home, but instead we get vampiric teleportation & a clichéd castle.
Night of the Living Dummy III [#40]
Hey, do you remember that story about kids getting blamed for the bad stuff an evil, living dummy is doing? Yeah, so does the writer of this book. Sure, now there’s an attic full of dummies, but that doesn’t add anything. This shtick past its expiry date two books ago, and it’s not only stale, but now it’s starting to smell.
Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes [#34]
I wanted to like this story. I find garden gnomes a little creepy, and they’re made of stone, so they’d be dangerous little imps. But, the majority of this book is about the gnomes enacting garden vandalism, and goes into ridiculous territory as the book reaches its conclusion. This is terrible, and I’m not even up to the Bottom 25 yet...
One Day At Horrorland [#16]
This is where things go downhill. A family visits a theme park called Horrorland, with rides all themed around fear, and the staff all seem to be literal monsters. This story feels surreal - not in a “whacky, woah” sense, but in a “these plot points don’t actually flow together” sense, and the remaining narrative left got lost in the fracas.
The Bottom 25 Worst Original Goosebumps Books
25. Let's Get Invisible! [#06]
What would you do if you could turn invisible? Would you try to fight crime, like a superhero? Would you sneak into the changing rooms to see people naked? Would you break into banks and steal money? Any of these answers could be interesting! But, the only uninteresting thing would be to just stand around and see how long you stay invisible for. That’s literally what happens in this story - kids discover a magic mirror that can turn them invisible, and they don’t do anything with it. What an absolute waste... This is lower on this list because the writing is pretty okay, and some of the scary elements of the mirror are kind of cool the first time you read it. However, this story is just so boring to read! Plus, this was such a disappointing waste of a good story idea that rather than a dis/honourable mention like other mediocre books, I think it deserves its place on the very bottom of this list.
24. The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight [#20]
I think that I had nightmares about this story, but mostly because scarecrows are kind of scary looking, and the idea of them walking around is creepy. But, the story itself is kind of tame. Some kids go to visit family living out on a farm, but their grandparents are acting weird. And two of the farmhands, who are either poorly-educated or mentally inferior, tell the kids freaky stories about the scarecrows moving in the night. I still kind of enjoy how much atmosphere there is in this book, but it’s ultimately wasted since the scarecrows are basically set-dressing, they don’t really attack the kids, instead scarecrows just kind of “show up in places scarecrows usually aren’t” - which makes sense, scarecrows are mostly straw, so they probably couldn’t do much damage. Also, did I mention that there’s a book of magic in this story? Yeah, that’s kind of silly...
23. The Blob That Ate Everyone [#55]
This book manages to ruin two good plot ideas. Firstly, I’ve always thought that The Blob seems like a scary movie idea, but this book isn’t really about amorphous monsters so much as a magic typewriter. A young writer is writing a story about a blob monster, but when the local store burns down, he finds a typewriter in the wreckage. He takes it home, but everything he writes comes true, even the blob monster. This started off interesting, but not only does it get really weird near the end - the twist is total garbage. I won’t spoil anything, but rest assured, the ending is so bad that it makes the rest of the book even worse.
22. Why I'm Afraid of Bees [#17]
This book started off alright, but it bee-railed pretty quickly. Sorry, I’ll try to bee serious. The premise is that a weak and nerdy loner is sick of beeing himself, so he uses a body-switching business to switch his mind with another kid using a machine - but a malfunction causes his mind to get stuck in the body of a honeybee. Unfortunately, Animorphs this is not, so not only is the bee biology in the book not entirely accurate, but there is some buzz-shite about DNA transference which makes so little sense, I think it makes negative sense? And, although this is going to be the case for most of the books on this list, I have to say that the ending really sucks. Body-switching is a classic staple of horror and sci-fi, but at the end of the day this isn’t about transforming or learning to see life from a new perspective - it’s basically about how much it sucks to be a bee, when you aren’t.
21. Monster Blood [#03]
Okay, this is going to be a long one... like I said in the last post, occasionally Goosebumps had stories that continued through several books. Well, Monster Blood was one of those series, and it is collectively the worst continuous series of Goosebumps ever written, which is a shame since it started so well. A kid goes to stay with his creepy aunt, and because he’s bored and desperate to find something to do, he befriends a local girl and buys an ancient green Gak/Play-Do/Slime toy from the local toyshop called Monster Blood. This stuff can stretch, bounce and be generally gross, but over time the toy changes, and not only does it start to feel warm and sticky, but it also starts to grow and grow and grow. As I said above, I think the idea of a blob monster is pretty cool, and if you cut this book in half, yeah, this would be great. But the way this story ends is so bad, genuinely, that without that ending this story might be on the Best 25 list. But, the stupid twist retroactively ruins the rest of the story.
20. Monster Blood II [#18]
I said it was a long one - this still has the characters from the first book, and they can be enjoyable, but it comes back with the same story again - the monster blood grows and grows, and if anything is ever dumb enough to eat it, they will also grow to a monstrous size. Someone feeds it to a hamster, and horror ensues. Cuddles the hamster is yet another unofficial mascot of Goosebumps (“Curly” the purple-mohawked skeleton is the “official” mascot of the series for some reason), but I don’t find Monster Blood scary... though, that’s mostly because the books suck. I mean, it’s a thick, living slimy substance that grows and grows. And hey, it’s monster blood, so could you imagine what monster has this pumping through their veins? But, no, we never get anything that cool. When it comes to monster blood, instead of fighting it, or containing it, people spend the majority of these books eating it. Gross...
19. Monster Blood III [#29]
Once again, something eats Monster Blood and grows out of control - but this time, it’s out main character! Of course, if you’ve read the last book, you’d know that he already did that, but I think that, just as the last two were inspired by The Blob, this one is inspired by Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and whilst that’s not a bad way to start a story, what takes this down a lot is that, firstly, there are a few more characters here which seem very poorly characterized, and secondly, they don’t really do anything with the 50 Foot Kid thing, that whole section seems to last four chapters or so. Maybe it was longer, but it doesn’t feel that way - and a lot of this is based on the contrived notion that some kid under the age of ten is a chemistry genius, who seems to have invented an antidote for a green slime which, according to the previous books, is meant to work by magic or something.
18. A Night In Terror Tower [#27]
Believe it or not, I don’t hate stories about magic. I kind of like magic, it’s a very cool concept, and it’s one of the reasons fiction can be so imaginative. But, when a story’s entire premise, conflict & resolution all have the same cause, and that cause is literally “a wizard did it”, I have a hard time enjoying it. This isn’t very high on this list because I accept that this is fairly well plotted - a lot of the ideas here seem to fit together quite nicely. Maybe if this had a few more rewrites I would enjoy it, but as it stands it still feels like the reader was an afterthought when writing this, because they’re not privy to any of the machinations behind this plot until very near the end. Even then, the characterization given here is pretty flawed, and as much as the story makes more sense when you understand the twist behind it, it also develops a fair number of inconsistencies.
17. Attack of the Mutant [#25]
I wish this didn’t have to go on this list, because there are some cool ideas here with a kid obsessed with comic books discovering a supervillain’s lair on the outskirts of his hometown. And the villain is a scary concept - he can change into any animal, and any form of solid matter, at will. However, this book is yet another entry in the “well-written, but not-quite-scary” books of Goosebumps. It’s actually more of an action comedy at times, but that’s not what puts it on the worst list. As well as not-quite scary, this book is the first in a series of what-the-hell-is-going-on books - which is to say a book where the plot, setting or characters are so inconsistent that it’s impossible to use logic to understand what’s going on. In this case, the characters in the story seem to react in weird ways, but also there is some strange magic regarding how the comic books that the kid is reading are recounting everything that happens when he goes into the villain’s lair - at first it’s confusing, but when the twist finally rolls around and uncoils itself, it just leaves me staring at the wall with a blank expression.
16. How I Got My Shrunken Head [#39]
Just like the previous entry, this is a story that has some cool ideas, but ultimately it starts to fall into some kind of dream logic. But, this one is worse for two reasons. Firstly, the story takes place in a kind of jungle, but unlike some of the previous versions, this felt so poorly written. Literally, because the writer didn’t spend enough time describing the location, it basically felt like the kid was running around a movie studio backlot covered in fake leaves. It’s a shame because this story managed to use magic more effectively than some of the others which I found disappointing, but the ending of this story also felt pretty weak.
15. The Haunted Mask II [#36]
You might remember that I put the previous installment of this story on the other list. It wasn’t the best story, but I still quite enjoyed it (despite the odd ending). This story does a few things right - we see the story through one of the other characters’ eyes, that’s interesting. Plus, we change the formula a little so that instead of the same threat, it’s a new danger using a similar theme. Unfortunately, this book did both of those poorly. Instead of the main girl, this time we’re following one of the pranksters who bullied her from the last book. Also, whilst the last mask was evil, and made the girl act evil by scaring people and threatening them, in this book the mask is... old. Yeah, old and it makes the kid act old by feeling tired and grumpy. Also, although they make a few references to how the previous story ended - this actually does something even weirder... so, it’s a lesser copy of the previous book, with nothing new to add except a more boring mask, and less scares.
14. I Live in Your Basement! [#61]
This was the second-last book in the original series, and it’s disturbingly bad. Okay, the premise of this book is that after the main character gets hit in the head with a baseball bat, he starts getting strange messages from a boy who claims to live in his basement - but, every time our main character tries to find him, or reveal the boy to his family, the evidence disappears. Look, I get that the premise of this story, and the horror here, is that this kid gets hit in the head and seems to be losing his mind. But, I’ve seen really good stories about going insane - this book seems to use it as an excuse to become a what-the-hell-is-going-on kind of book. Props, characters, actions and settings seem to occur randomly. And, sure, the kid draws attention to it, only for the book to claim it’s because he was hit in the head and now he’s either in a coma, or losing his mind, or dreaming... yeah, by the end of the book it gets so convoluted that even the explanations the book gives us defy explanation.
13. Go Eat Worms! [#21]
I’m sorry, but worms aren’t really scary. Maybe you, dear reader, are scared of worms, but they’re small, fragile and I think they’re actually kind of cute, in a way. That’s not what gets it on this list, though - I don’t think cuckoo clocks are scary either, but someone managed to squeeze a creepy story out of that. No, it’s on this list, frankly, because it’s so stupid. A young kid is obsessed with worms, because of course he is, and he is told (inaccurately, I might add) that cutting a worm in half will cause one worm to become two. After he does this, however, he seems to anger the worms, as they seem to randomly show up in places where worms usually aren’t. Most of this turns out to be just his sister pranking him, but then completely out of nowhere, the character gets attacked by a worm that is as wide as a tree trunk and several storeys tall! Seriously... seriously. That isn’t even the twist, the twist is even stupider, this is just a random thing that happens near the end. Why a giant worm? Why, book? Why?
12. The Horror at Camp Jellyjam [#33]
I was enjoying this book, when I first read it. A few of these books take place at summer camps, but instead of ghosts, more ghosts or dangerous camp activities, this one goes in a cool, new direction. Basically, this camp is a sports camp, and there seems to be some weird Stepford’s Campers thing going on where the camp counselors all seem overly enthusiastic, and all of the kids are competing to be the fastest, the strongest and the best - but for some reason, whenever someone is awarded as the champion, they go missing. It’s a creepy, kind of cool premise. However, the reason it gets on this list is the same as Monster Blood and Attack the Mutant before it... the ending ruins the book. That might seem strange to blame the ending for ruining an otherwise good book, but this whole story is built around this mystery - why are the counselors acting like this? Why is there such a focus on competition? What happens to the champions who keep disappearing? So, you’re heavily invested in the answer to that question. However, when you get that answer, if it doesn’t meet the standard of the mystery that it was building up to - and it doesn’t suit the clues you were given - then it feels like the whole thing was a waste of time.
So, I have to admit, I do think that you should read this book, it was good to start with and you might like it more than I did... but the ending was so bad that I hated reading it, which is why I put it so high on this worst list.
11. My Best Friend is Invisible [#57]
In this story, a kid gets a new, invisible friend, but because no one else can see them, the kid is kind of weird and clingy, and starts ruining the main character’s life. What makes this so bad is, firstly, the inconsistency - it’s hard to tell whether this kid is actually being friendly, or if he is genuinely trying to make the main character miserable - but it turns out, no, he’s genuinely trying to be a nice person... so, why was he such an arsehole, then? Also, in one of the earlier chapters of the book, the protagonist’s younger brother telegraphs the climax of the book by revealing that he invented “a flashlight that makes invisible things visible”... okay, fuck you. That’s worse than just bad writing, that’s insulting. I kept confusing this book for I Live in Your Basement! but, can you blame me? Both are about kids being harassed by a strange and secretive, possibly monstrous, boy living in their house, and the ending to both stories are twists that come out of nowhere and which makes a mockery of the rest of the book. Oh, but if you want to know why this gets a worse score? Then you’ll have to look up what the twist is. Oh boy...
10. Egg Monsters From Mars [#42]
I already explained why this book sucks in explicit detail, during my Blogger Beware post for Parody Week. But, let’s cover the basics. Eggs are scary for two reasons - they’re slimy and sometimes they hatch - this book doesn’t go that angle. Instead, the story is about a kid who finds an alien egg during an egg hunt, and when he tries to find out more about where it came from, he gets captured by an evil scientist. That’s such a let-down, not because an alien egg is such a great premise (it’s kind of weird to be honest), but you could do so much more with it than this nonsense. I mean, seriously, if you go now and get a pen and a small bit of paper, like a post-it note, a napkin or the back of an envelope, and write down a list of things that could happen in a story, when in the first chapter or so your character discovers “an enormous, green egg, which looks like it’s covered in purple veins”. I’m sure that you could come up with a much better story than this, because although this is a weird one, there is so much that you can do with a premise like that. But this book chooses, instead, to go the “what if the scientist is a meanie?” plot. And since half of the book is spent with the kid trapped in a mostly-white room, it gets boring pretty quickly.
9. Monster Blood IV [#62]
This is the last book - both of the Monster Blood series, and the original Goosebumps series. And if you want to know how bad it is, just look at how much further down the list it got. In this story, our main characters return a fourth time, but there’s a new kind of monster blood. Now, that’s a cool idea to start off with, because frankly there wasn’t much more you could do with the green slime. However, this book struggles to make any sense. Firstly, the new monster blood is just found, randomly, in a dumpster behind a science lab. Second, this monster blood turns into little blue slugs with eyestalks and razor-sharp teeth, which multiply when they get wet - kind of like gremlins, I guess. This starts off weird and dumb, but it gets even weirder and dumber when we learn how to defeat these things... are you ready? if they get big enough, blue monster-blood slugs eat each other. So, if you want to know the plot of this book, tape a blue balloon over the end of a hose and turn on the tap so it fills with water and pops. That’s basically what happened. And the twist... well, let’s just say that I should have seen it coming when I saw which dumpster they fetched this new stuff from, but nothing prepared me for this ending...
8. Attack of the Jack O'Lanterns [#48]
I have so many questions about this story, but I know that none of them will have satisfying answers. This story is about a kid and her best friend who believes that two of the kids from school are to blame for always ruining Halloween. So, they decides to get payback by enlisting the help of two of her friends to dress up as scary Halloween monsters and torment them. The first half of this book is dedicated to flashbacks, but after that the majority of this book is two people in jack-o’lantern costumes forcing kids to trick-or-treat non-stop, then eat all the candy, then keep trick-or-treating to the point that I’d call it a form of torture. And then it all ends with a twist which, whilst it does explain some of what happened, it’s also incredibly stupid and it raises more questions than it answers. Considering that this book had such awesome cover art, it’s a shame this book sucked so much.
7. It Came From Beneath the Sink! [#30]
Hey, guess what’s not scary?! That’s right, sponges! Seriously, this book is about an evil sponge. And sure I get it; the plot kind of makes sense of it. A girl moves to a new house and discovers a weird sponge under the sink that looks like it has glowing, red eyes, and it seems to feed on her misfortune, pulsing and absorbing all of her hatred and anger. Y’know, kind of like the way a sponge doesn’t. But, more than that, it’s said that if she ever tries to get rid of it, she will be killed. How does she learn this information? Well, from a book in the library of course. It tells her all about the creature, explaining that it’s a monster called a Grool and that the only way to get rid of it is to pass it on. Even if this book gave the monsters less goofy-sounding names, I think the fact that the major antagonist is a very angry sponge makes this book laughably bad. The only reason it’s not higher on this list is because I kind of like the way this conflict was resolved, even though it was very silly.
6. Don't Go to Sleep! [#54]
I have already talked about books which I put in the what-the-hell-is-going-on category. This book is one of the worst offenders, since the premise of this story is a kid who goes to sleep and wakes up in an alternate reality. Now, whilst alternate realities can be a cool idea in general, this book basically treats each reality like a waking nightmare, with people acting strange and unrealistically, and each one comes and goes within a chapter or two, so quickly that it feels vague and insubstantial. Then the ending revolves around the kid being tried by the “reality police”... it’s an absolute mess. Not only is this plot generally messy and uninteresting, but if you think about it, the moral of this story (if it has one at all) is that you should be content with your life, even if it sucks, because it could be worse. That’s a terrible moral! Sure, be grateful for the positive things in your life, but you shouldn’t be complacent with those things which make your life a burden. So, bad story, bad moral - oh, and bad writing too.
5. A Shocker on Shock Street [#35]
A pair of siblings are brought out to test a new theme park - it’s called Shock Street, and apparently it’s inspired by the Shock Street horror film franchise. The kids are huge fans, and they get a sneak peak of the park because their Dad’s part of the production. Based on “One Day at Horrorland and this book as well, I have a sneaking suspicion that R.L. Stine has never gone to a theme park. For one thing, rides usually have operators, so kids just jumping on and off running ride cars makes no sense. But, more importantly, animatronics tend to be very expensive, so they’re unlikely to be very big, and they are almost always secured to the floor, so the giant, animatronic praying mantis, as depicted on the cover and in the story itself, makes no sense. But, that’s all just preamble to how random this story gets, going from place to place, falling through death trap after death trap.
Then, once again, an ending which is so bad it retroactively makes the story worse... I hate it when that happens.
4. Beware, the Snowman [#51]
I’m not sure why this is the case, maybe I can’t remember why (haha), but this book isn’t very memorable. I have read it, from cover to cover. But, I struggle to remember what happens in it. But, based on the summary I read online, maybe its because this book is boring, and the plot feels disconnected. A girl moves to a snowy town, where everyone has a creepy snowman out the front of their house, and she is told a story about an evil wizard or a wizard duel or something... and there’s a cave on the mountain, and a poem. I swear, I read the summary before writing this, but I can’t remember it at all. It doesn’t help that snowmen just, generally, aren’t very scary, even if they have a scar on their face, i.e. someone drew a line in the snow of their face - woah, scary(!). Plus, this is another plot where the conflict and resolution are all “a wizard did it”. Ugh, so boring... these books are usually good, I swear, just please, don’t read this one.
3. The Barking Ghost [#32]
Okay, okay, we’re on the home stretch. But I think I need to clarify, every single one of these books has something in common. First of all, their all what-the-hell-is-going-on books. In this story, two kids are being haunted by a pair of ghostly dogs, which lures them out into a shed in the woods called the Changing Room (seriously? I hate you). When they enter the shed, the two kids become the dogs! and the dogs become the two kids too... yeah, that’s what happens. Then they try to get their parents to help, but “oh no”, they’re dogs, dogs can’t talk, silly. And they’re also ghosts, so they sometimes can go through walls, but not always, since the parents always call them “dogs” and never “ghost dogs” (or, dare I say, “barking ghosts”?... I’ll see myself out). But they can’t seem to convince their parents to help, so they finally just attack the ghost-dogs-in-their-bodies, and drag them back to the changing room. That’s the story. I picked up a book that was meant to be about a ghost dog haunting a house, and instead I get a story about the whacky hijinks of two undead canines who were kids before they got lost in the woods. Is it possible to hate something so much it hurts? Because I have a headache.
2. The Beast From the East [#43]
I don’t think I’m the first person to make this comparison, but this whole book is basically a novel-length round of Calvinball. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a game where you make up the rules as you play. The plot of this is that kids get lost in the woods, and discover monsters who make them join in their game - which is impossible to follow, as although it “supposedly” has rules that people follow, it’s clear that the writer was just making it up as they went along. Ostensibly, it’s kind of like tag, except you have to tag people from the East (hence the title, Beast from the East... can I go home now?). Also, the woods are like half-monstery too, so the setting is all weird and unnatural too, so there’s literally no logic to come into play - there are no rules, and there’s no reality that we can rely on to keep us grounded. I hate this. When I read this story, I put it down and decided that I would never read it again, and I would warn people not to, because it is the worst Goosebumps story ever written... Yep, definitely the worst. It can’t possibly get worse than this. Seriously, how could it get worse?
1. Legend of the Lost Legend [#47]
Fuck you, R.L. Stine. You’re a part of my childhood whether you had ghost writers or not - but, fuck you for writing this book. I hate this. Like, yeah, I hate The Beast From the East, but at least it had monsters in it, and at least the woods were... weird. But, Legend of the Lost Legend “supposedly” takes place in the real world - a Dad and his two kids are on a camping trip in the middle of the woods. Yeah, they’re in the fictional country of Brovania, to find a legendary manuscript called “The Lost Legend”, and although Brovania isn’t real Europe is, & presumably so too are all the other -vanias: Transyl, Pennsyl, Castle... anyway, let’s do a quick dot-point of the plot. A large viking woman, uses noodles to tell their fortune; the kids are sent on a ‘survival test’ in the Fantasy Forest; The trees start raining nuts, which pop open to reveal robotic mice that attack them; the kids knock down some plastic trees, are attacked by bats, then fall into quicksand; then the kids are attacked by giant cats that are several storeys tall & try to eat the kids, but then decide not to and spit them out, and the kids return to the cabin only to learn that the viking woman is actually a wind-up doll...
That’s not even the half of it. This book is just random bullshit, and all of it leads up to a twist that is bad enough to have ruined any other book, but for this story, it just made me feel deflated. Do not ever read this book, unless you are planning on using it as a guide for how books ought not be written. Fuck this book, Fuck R.L. Stine, Fuck you for making me want to do this list, and Fuck me for actually deciding to read this fucking book. Fuck.
Anyway, that’s my list. It’s getting late, so I need to get going, but I hope you enjoyed this list a hell of a lot more than I liked reading the books that appear on it. I will always love Goosebumps books, because of the role they played in my childhood, but every rose has its thorns, and I’ve grasped this bouquet and bled profusely so that others won’t have to...
I’m the Absurd Word Nerd, and Until Next time, I’m going to read a book that isn’t Goosebumps...
