COVER STORY
We are once again faced with another iconic Tim Jacobus cover. There is some history to how this design came to be. According to Jacobus himself, he had his niece pose for the artwork. She was excited and told all her friends that she was on a Goosebumps cover, only to soon see that her face was obscured by the haunted mask. And what a mask it is. The menacing glowing eyes, the demonic fangs, dripping in drool. Giving off the sense that this mask is very much alive. And juxtaposing the image of this nightmare mask over an innocent looking child works to make it more impactful. It's also a cover that doesn't feature much for a background, which makes sense given that the focus has to remain entirely on Carly Beth. It's top tier creepy and one of the finest works in the series.
FACE TO FACE WITH A NIGHTMARE...
How ugly is Carly Beth's Halloween mask? It's so ugly that it almost scared her little brother to death. So terrifying that even her friends are totally freaked out by it.
It's the best Halloween mask ever. It's everything that Carly Beth hoped it would be. And more.
Maybe too much more. Because Halloween is almost over.
And Carly Beth is still wearing that special mask...
STORY
Carly Beth Caldwell is a scaredy cat. Scared of practically everything. Everybody knows it, particularly Chuck Greene and Steve Boswell who get enjoyment out of constantly making her panic. Be it slamming a lunch tray really hard to make her jump, or putting a worm in her sandwich. In other words, the issue doesn't seem so much with just Carly Beth being scared, but with her being constantly tortured. She runs home after school and is greeted by her mother, who has made a ceramic sculpture of Carly Beth's head as a symbol of her love. A creepy symbol, but her heart is in the right place.
Carly Beth goes to her room to check out the duck costume her mother got her for Halloween, only to be attacked by the costume. Actually it's Noah, her younger brother. And yes, this is the second younger brother named Noah in the series so far. Don't think because you called him Lefty for the majority of the book that I forgot Jovial Bob. After that scare, and I guess because the point hasn't been made yet, we get a quick science fair scene where once again Chuck and Steve scare Carly Beth by pretending to have let a tarantula loose. With everyone laughing at her now, even the teachers, Carly Beth has had it. She's going to find some way to get revenge. To scare Chuck and Steve.
Her plan? To go to the party store and buy a new mask. One that will really scare them. She arrives, and after a quick fake out of the store being closed, she is greeted by the shop keep. A man with slicked black hair and a pencil thin mustache. Carly Beth asks for a really scary mask, to which he really tries to sell her on a gorilla mask. Turns out she has no interest in monkey business as she sees a small room in the shop. Inside she sees a series of really gruesome masks, including a yellow-green one with bulging eyes, a skeleton nose, and a purple-lipped mouth with large fangs. She asks to buy it, but the shopkeeper says that it is not for sale. But after her constant begging, she gets it. Impressed by its scariness, and hoping it'll freak Chuck and Steve, she brings it home to scare Noah. It certainly works. Almost to well as her voice seems to be different under the mask, more monstrous sounding. And she also seems to have problems at first with getting the mask off.
Carly Beth sets out for her Halloween run, particularly hoping to get Chuck and Steve early. She wears her mask, while taking the plaster head of hers and putting it on a broomstick. She ends up scaring two kids and having a standoff with their mother. Carly Beth growls at her, and has thoughts of tearing her apart before the kids drag their mother off. Sabrina Mason, her best friend, runs into Carly Beth and is freaked out be the mask, when she presses her over it, suddenly Carly Beth snaps at her, grabbing Sabrina's throat. Carly Beth is confused about why she's doing all these things, or why she attacked her best friend.
Despite the attempted strangulation, Sabrina and Carly Beth press on. Carly Beth acting more aggressive and scaring trick-or-treaters, throwing candy apples at a house, and eventually stealing candy from other trick-or-treaters. She splits from Sabrina and finds Chuck and Steve. She manages to scare them with her mask, but particularly with the plaster head. Suddenly, the three kids see the head begin to cry for help. Chuck and Steve run in fear while Carly Beth celebrates her victory, though convinced the whole talking head thing was something she imagined. She runs back into Sabrina and tells her of her success before heading to Sabrina's house to check their candy. While there, Carly Beth tries to take the mask off, but suddenly it can't come off again. In fact, this time it's so sealed to her head it's as if it's grafted to her skin. In a panic, Carly Beth runs off.
Hoping the party store shopkeeper might help her, she returns to the party store. We get another "closed" fake-out, but the shopkeeper is still inside and tells her that he expected her return. Carly Beth asks to get the mask off, but he tells her that it can't be taken off because it isn't a mask. What Carly Beth saw in the room were The Unloved, human faces that he created, hoping they'd be beautiful, but they withered and grew ugly over time. Now that I think about it, Stine kind of ripped off Darkman a bit with this. He tells her that there is one way to remove the mask, and that is by a symbol of love.
Suddenly, the rest of the unloved faces begin to move on their own, ready to attack Carly Beth. She manages to run out of the shop. She thinks to what the symbol of love could be and realizes it must be the plaster head. But when she looks for it, suddenly it's nowhere to be fou-oh wait, there it is. The unloved catch up to her, but she takes the plaster head and places it over her head. It manages to work, not just in getting rid of the unloved, but removing the haunted mask from her face.
TWIST ENDING
Carly Beth returns home. She begins to talk to her mother about what a weird night it's been, when suddenly Noah shows up, the haunted mask now on his face.
CONCLUSION
The Haunted Mask remains one of the best stories R.L. Stine ever put to paper. A lot of that does have to do with setting it at Halloween, and we do get a good feel for the atmosphere of that late fall evening. But what makes this book work is Carly Beth, who I still maintain is Goosebumps' best protagonist. While she doesn't do anything that remarkable, it's her character in general that makes her so memorable, because it's so relatable. The easily scared kid who gets constantly picked on by others, who is tired of the torture and abuse she's getting. She seeks revenge, but soon her revenge goes too far, causing the good person inside her to start to succumb to the monster trying to take her over. The unloved face looking to merge with the unwilling body. It makes her plight that much more interesting.
Some things of course make no sense because Stine really didn't put in the effort to explain them all too well. What was the purpose of making the unloved faces? We know that the shopkeeper was a scientist, but that's all. At least in the television adaptation, the explanation given was that he himself was trying to mask his imperfections, change his own face and keep his beauty forever, but the experiment constantly failed, the faces eventually decaying overtime. Like, I said it reminds me of Darkman in how Liam Neeson's Peyton Westlake, after being horrifically disfigured, needs to use a special fleshlike polymer on his face to mask it, but it constantly fails after a short period of time. These lasted much longer than Darkman, but I can't help but think Jovial Bob aped the movie a tad.
Scares actually work in this one. Not that anything is downright horrific, save for maybe the floating unloved heads, but the transformation of Carly Beth from meek to monster, getting darker over time, really adds for some great visuals and thoughts. I will say that this book being too chockfull of chapter stinger scares, including two where the store is supposedly closed, does hurt it slightly. The twist is also just okay, probably the only way to end this book on any sort of cliffhanger. But none of that hurts this book from being a really breezy read that doesn't feel like it drags too much. In the end, this remains one of the best Goosebumps book to read in October, or any month in particular. There's no masking this book's quality.
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