Previously in this series.
Your household is stunningly average.
The same goes for your entire family aside from one eccentric relative who’s always up to something kooky.
Your parents don’t like when you visit that relative for extended periods. You’ve never figured out why … until now.
You’re easy to read.
There’s something peculiar about your neighbor/best friend/substitute teacher/piano instructor/school crossing guard/primary care physician/babysitter/county clerk.
You’ve recently moved to a new house and you’re still finding your footing, so it’s a good thing everyone around town is so welcoming. Almost too welcoming.
You’re not actually sure which state you live in. It’s clearly in America, probably the Midwest, but it has no distinguishing features, nor is it ever identified in school or at home. So you just kind of go with it.
Your younger sibling is a real thorn in your side, but secretly, you value them above all else and would lay down your life for them in a heartbeat.
You have nothing more than a passing interest in the paranormal. And why would you?
Your pet keeps running away. It’s suspicious and worrying, but only to you; your parents, as in all other things, seem ambivalent.
You’re adequate at everything and not great at anything; aside from your stunningly average household and your often absent pet, you don’t have much to lose.
You speak in cryptic sentence fragments whenever the need arises.
You’ve never looked under your own bed, nor do you intend to. The same goes for the sink. It’s just better that way.
You are very involved in extracurricular activities to the point that they are your singular focus, especially when something goes awry.
You’ve never been on a vacation without something going horribly wrong, and yet you keep going.
You can’t believe how boring your life is right up until it isn’t, at which point you wonder why things can’t go back to the tedious state they were once in.
Your attic is full of secrets.
Whenever you find objects of suspect origin in the trash or at thrift stores, you acquire them, because what could go wrong?
You get the sinking feeling that there are countless other kids out there like you, experiencing similar phenomena, and you wish you could learn from their past mistakes but find yourself unable to do so. You are utterly alone in your struggles, however long they may last.
You’ll make it through whatever life-threatening problems you face, no matter how extraordinary the circumstances, and you’ll do it with a pun at the ready.
Despite your repetitive nature and lack of true ingenuity, everyone fondly remembers you and you invoke a certain sense of nostalgia.
You have a habit of painstakingly describing the outfits of everyone around you.
Your town is one of those towns where everyone knows you by name with the exception of that mysterious shopkeeper who’s just opened a spooky curios store around the corner from your house.
Every time you see an unfamiliar place—particularly a dark, dank one—you feel the need to explore it, even though that’s never panned out for you before.
Your parents ship you off to summer camp, your grandma’s house, your cousin’s cabin, and other locales uncomfortably often, but you wouldn’t tell them that.
You pride yourself on being tough, even though you know deep down that you’re just as scared as any other kid.
You feel the need to prove something.
Your friends are a terrible influence.
Your hobbies—magic, ventriloquism, a Fab Four-style garage band—are charmingly antiquated.
You have trust issues, but not the kind where you don’t trust anyone; instead, you trust everyone, and you trust them way too easily.
You’re sure the popular kids would like you if they just got to know you, but you’re doomed to stay average the rest of your life.
You have a best friend, and the two of you do everything together. It’s not just because you like each other that much, though; it’s more that when you’re separated, terrible things tend to happen.
Your sense of humor is terrible.
You get made fun of sometimes. It’s hurtful, and you’d do almost anything to teach your tormentors a lesson. Almost.
You’re a bit young to speak and act the way you do, but no one seems to notice that.
You can’t wait till it’s your turn to care for the class pet.
You always answer the phone even when you get the nagging feeling that you really shouldn’t.
The science fair is right around the corner and you’ll be devastated if you don’t win.
You have a rival, and your rivalry is well documented to the point that your typically passive parents are concerned.
Look behind you.
Tags: books, christy admiraal, goosebumps, horror, how to tell what novel you’re in
This is funny, I was just talking about Goosebumps today!
“Despite your repetitive nature and lack of true ingenuity, everyone fondly remembers you and you invoke a certain sense of nostalgia.”
So true. You know I barely even remember anything about Goosebumps and yet they make me nostalgic to think about. HOW MYSTERIOUS!
The only goosebumps book I ever read was a Reader Beware!! You Choose the Scare! one, and I remember feeling fairly confident until I got to a page that said “If it’s a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, turn to page 102”.
This loss of control was, evidently, too much for me to handle, because I remember giving up and finding every page with THE END before picking the one I liked the best.
I used to do that with choose-your-own-adventure books! I’d usually read through once to have an idea of the story, then find my favourite ending and go backwards recording the way to get there, then read through.
Looking back, this seems like an excessively involved way to read.
You have a habit of painstakingly describing the outfits of everyone around you.
This COULD also indicate that you’re in a Baby-Sitter’s Club book.
IT DID. http://the-toast.net/2014/12/09/tell-baby-sitters… “You take great pleasure in listing every article of clothing you’re wearing, as well as every article of clothing each of your six closest friends are wearing.” (And that was definitely a Christy contribution. I’m still a little mad at Bethany for thinking of “Your peer group has associate members.”)
Also a Nancy Drew book, although those include a detailed physical description as well as a description of the outfit.
Look behind you.
HEY D:
There’s something peculiar about your neighbor/best friend/substitute teacher/piano instructor/school crossing guard/primary care physician/babysitter/county clerk.
This also reminds me of that elementary-school-age series where all the books were called things like “Mermaids Don’t Coach Swim Team” or “Leprechauns Can’t Play Basketball” or “My Camp Counselor is Definitely Not a Secret Werewolf.” Each book had the exact same plot, which was that the main kids begin to suspect that some adult they know is a supernatural being, evidence keeps piling up to support this conclusion, and then at the end of the book the mysterious person just skips town or disappears or whatever, and the kids can never prove anything, ever.
ETA: I looked it up, it was called the Bailey School Kids, and turns out the leprechaun/basketball one is in fact a real title and not a thing I made up. (There is a list of all the books and the titles get progressively wackier as the writers presumably start running out of monsters and mundane activities.)
I could have sworn that one of them was “Skeletons don’t Skateboard,” but Wiki says no. BUT I HAVE A VERY VIVID MEMORY OF A SKELETON ON A SKATEBOARD WHERE DID THIS COME FROM.
“Dracula Doesn’t Rock and Roll”? Well, they obviously never heard of the “Dracula Rock”, a (German) song we used to sing in camp. According to this song, Dracula only drinks grape juice because this gives him enough energy to become “the king of Rock’n’Roll”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipAyibMEY3M. (It’s in German, of course, but the video has lots of children pretending to be vampires.)
Apparently he doesn’t Rock and Roll, doesn’t drink lemonade, and doesn’t play kickball. What a wet blanket, amiright?
“Ninjas Don’t Bake Pumpkin Pie” oh my god.
I actually saw a copy of Ghosts Don’t Eat Potato Chips at Goodwill this weekend.
Genies Don’t Ride Bicycles! Cupid Doesn’t Flip Hamburgers! Aliens Don’t Wear Braces! These were more targeted towards my sister, but I definitely read my fair share of them.
I immediately thought of this series too.
I’m pretty sure I read Gremlins Don’t Chew Bubblegum (I remember a picture of some kind of monster blowing a really big bubble on the cover) and even as a kid I thought it was stupid and never read any of the others.
I wonder if the “Leprechauns Can’t Play Basketball” one might have inspired that Disney TV movie with the high school kid who plays basketball who turns out to be half leprechaun on his Mom’s side, and there’s an evil leprechaun played by Timothy Omundson who steals his gold.
I literally never look behind me and am thus perfectly safe. Even from YOU, antique-ventriloquist’s-dummy-nobody-else-seems-worried-about-but-which-fills-me-with-a-creeping-sense-of-dread.
I also refuse to look behind me, or to open my eyes if something freaks me out in the middle of the night. Not because I’m invisible if I can’t see whatever-it-is, but because monsters/kidnappers/looming specters of mortality in movies only attack after the hero/ine has had a chance to notice them and scream. If you never notice them, they can never attack you.
Aaaah, creeping sense of dread! It’s the worst sense of dread, because nobody believes you, especially not your parents and/or bratty sibling(s).
This reminds me of The Babadook…
EFFFFFFFF. I still have not, and maybe never will, watch The Babadook. My friend even read me the whole recap, spoilers and all, so I know what happens, but I think I had better not watch it!
That’s why that movie’s so scary; it taps into the fundamental truth of the “investigating weird noises” conundrum.
Hmm, I really want to watch this, but seeing as my roommate’s out of town… it might not be a good idea. And also seeing as how I kept being suddenly woken up from a nap today by this weird tinking/buzzing sound that seemed to be coming from UNDER my pillow. I legit just did my best to go back to sleep a couple times because I did not want to actally check and have to deal with whatever I might have found under there.
It was nothing…
CHRISTY!!!! holy shit
::Scoffs:: If you need me, I’ll be reading REAL horror books by Christopher Pike.
(Is still scarred by some of that shit at 33 years old)
omg yes. Did you ever read the one in which the two girls go on holiday to Greece and become/are awakened to their true selves, i.e. Greek goddesses, and the one murders the other by feeding her a hamburger with ground glass in it? According to Amazon (thanks, Amazon!) it’s called The Immortal and I remember liking it a great deal, except for the ground glass part which I still think about whenever I eat a hamburger.
YES. I thought about the ground glass literally last night because I had one hell of a stomachache. And obviously, the normal reaction to that is “Oh my god, I must have eaten ground glass, just like in that book I read when I was 12.”
I think about this book more than any other book I read as a kid, because the ground up glass disturbed me so much (while at the same time thinking it was a brilliant idea.)
The shy, quiet, sweet one is ALWAYS the killer! also, Christopher Pike books always seemed to devolve into some crazy existential shit if they were a series. (Most notably Remember Me and The Last Vampire.)
Even now, I often find myself thinking about the bubble of air in a syringe with which the baddie in Remember Me (Amanda, was it? I recall that she and Shari were switched at birth) tried to kill Shari’s diabetic brother. I recently asked a doctor friend if that was a possible method for real murder. Apparently not…
That’s also the one with the “my parents weren’t super well off, but I got a Ferrari when I turned 16” thing which I didn’t really get how bizarre that statement was until years, YEARS after I read it.
AAAAAAAAAAAAA I REMEMBER THAT BOOK NOW. I loved all his terrible books! Especially the Fear Street novels, but that death is so extra bonkers that I have never forgotten it.
I may need to scour the Strand for cheap Christopher Pike books now.
I read that book 20 years ago and I still think about that broken glass part too!!!
I HAVE FOUND THE HEAVEN PLACE
Christopher Pike summaries and reviews! Now with extra snarky!
(It’s actually really fun, I’d forgotten about the cocaine-laced cheerleader cookies!)
THOSE WERE THE BEST.
I LOVED Christopher Pike books until I got to the one where the villains were secretly immortal incestuous dinosaur siblings and that was enough for 12-year old CaroWR. I think that was actually one of the earlier ones, and I read them out of order, so there were a LOT of teens and their sexy parties and their reincarnated grudges before I called it quits.
OH MY GOD is that the one where they are on some crazy scavenger hunt and end up in a cave with, like, a lake made of acid and they kill somebody by giving them a cup of it to drink and it melts their face? because i am STILL scarred by that at age 36.
Oh god, I read three Spooksville stories as a kid which I think fuelled nightmares for the rest of my life. I never even looked up his other works because I was so scared by it. The one with the frozen people coming to life… -shudders-
favorite goosebumps book?
mine is “say cheese and die,” which i realize is an uninspired choice, but i stand by it.
I was desperately hoping someone would start this.
Favorite: The Phantom of the Auditorium. Best: toss-up between Attack of the Mutant and One Day at HorrorLand.
One Day At HorrorLand was freaking amazing. I still remember it almost weekly.
“Stay Out Of The Basement” had a delightfully creepy vibe. I hated/loved it.
There’s a movie (or TV episode, I forget which) of Stay Out of the Basement, and they made us watch it in elementary school during EVERY rainy-day recess. It terrified me for months.
Margaret, help me I’m your real dad
That is awful. I don’t think they knew what “recess” meant.
Mine were the “Give yourself goosebumps” choose your own adventure ones.
Though “Piano Lessons Can be Murder” is up there.
The Ghost Next Door is the only one whose plot actually stuck with me, probably because it’s so un-Goosebumps-like.
I had the same reaction to GOOSEBUMPS books as I did (and do) to a lot of horror fiction/film: I was way too scared to ever actually read them (with the exception of a book of short stories that a friend had, which I read in her mother’s car while carpooling), but still had a morbid fascination with them, and so obsessively read the back covers. I’m sure the actual stories were way less scary than the ones I imagined.
As a kid who couldn’t even LOOK at the more grotesque covers for the longest time, I can confirm that the actual stories (once I worked up the gumption to read them) were… a letdown.
Has anyone else seen the trailer for/heard of the upcoming Goosebumps movie? It looks awful and I am very excited to see it. It’s actually strange to think that there haven’t been any feature-length live-action Goosebumps movies until now (to my knowledge).
Is this going to be an adaptation of a particular Goosebumps book or just a movie that is meant to encapsulate general Goosebumps-iness?
It appears to be a fantastiterrible mishmash of every Goosebumps book ever, starring Jack Black because of course it is.
Oh man so much Goosebumps nostalgia. I used to consume these things so often, they were like candy in book form. I remember my friend and I would have reading contests to see who could finish a Goosebumps faster, I think I read one in 10 minutes once.
Tower of Terror was always my favorite Goosebumps because of the historical aspect of it. I also really liked the one about the camp where all the really athletic kids were fed to some giant blob monster that sweated snails. Some of those books were really fucked up.
I was always too scared of the covers as a kid to read this series!
I’ve been binge-watching Are You Afraid of the Dark episodes on Youtube (they have all of them, I think) and it’s basically the same list, with the addition of Canadian accents and pat endings where the annoying little brother you always took for granted comes to save the day.
I just looked behind me and my coworker was standing there waiting for me to finish reading and then I jumped and spilled my water. SO THANKS FOR THAT.
http://www.bloggerbeware.com has recaps of all the books in the original series and a lot from the spinoff series(es), and they are amazing.
You wear a lot of Dayglo clothing.
You and/or people around you are always letting out shrill screams.
Somebody was always letting out a shrill scream right at the end of a chapter. R.L. could have used a thesaurus.
I used to do that with choose-your-own-adventure books! I'd usually read through once to have an idea of the story, then find my favourite ending and go backwards recording the way to get there, then read through.
Looking back, this seems like an excessively involved way to read.
Everyone is always compared to an animal. I think once a character was physically compared to a gnat or a mosquito. That’s stretching it a bit.