And so we've reached a book I wasn't too fond of last time. Once again, the strength of this reread is to give me a second glance at these books and see what I feel works and what I feel doesn't. So can this sloppy slice of life make a believer out of me? Let's see with You Can't Scare Me!
YOU CAN'T SCARE ME!
RELEASE MONTH: January, 1994
FRONT TAGLINE: They're coming for you...
COVER STORY
So, this was definitely a cover that got me initially. And it's not too hard to see why. This is a gorgeous piece of work. The orange sky, the twisted trees, the yellow mists set the stage for these mud monsters to rise from their slimy graves. I love the detail on the mud monsters, how they look both human and monster, how the mud drips off them, the different stages of the monsters rising from the muck. It's a great cover that drums up some frightening visuals. Also, a nice touch with whoever chooses the cover borders by going with a muddy yellow for the border.
IT'S GONNA BE A SCREAM!
Courtney is a total show-off. She thinks she's so brave and she's always making Eddie and his friends look like wimps.
But now Eddie's decided he's had enough. He's going to scare Courtney once and for all. And he's just come up with the perfect plan.
He's going to lure Courtney down to Muddy Creek. Because Eddie knows Courtney believes that silly rumor about the monsters. Mud Monsters that live in the creek.
Too bad Eddie doesn't believe the rumor.
Because it just might be true...
STORY
Eddie, our protagonist, has a problem. That problem being Courtney, a girl who he feels is too perfect and that she's loved by everyone. In other terms, Eddie thinks she's a Mary Sue, but thankfully it doesn't seem Stine knows that term. If this book was in 2020, Eddie would have a Youtube channel complaining about her every day, But this is 1994, so it's more just petty hatred. He's not alone in this hatred, his friends Molly and Charlene dislike her too. And their friend Hat, who is named that because he always wears a hat. His real name is Herbie. Now if his last name is Hancock then we have a book. The kids are taken to Greene Forest for a class trip to study the flora and fauna. Eddie has a scare with a snake, but Courtney grabs the snake and takes it away from him. Later she holds two bees in her hand, which Eddie hopes will get her stung, but after mocking Courtney a bit, she tosses the bees at him and his friends.
Eddie and his friends want revenge on Courtney for the bee stunt. They want to find out what scares her, as Courtney seems to be afraid of nothing. The bus heads through Muddy Creek, named that way due to a legend about mud monsters rising from the mud and dragging victims back into the ground. No one believes that story and Eddie's brother Kevin is even making a movie about the mud monsters. But the kids think that maybe if there's one thing that will scare Courtney, maybe it's that. But since we need to pad this story out, the kids try a myriad of other scare attempts instead. First attempt is to take a rubber snake and put it in her lunch, hoping it'll scare her. Despite the fact that we established that Courtney is fine around snakes. However, Courtney trades her lunch with a teacher, who gets scared instead and Courtney comes to the rescue by stomping the snake to "death".
Eddie tries to prove his bravery later by getting a stuck cat out of a tree, but he ends up stuck until Courtney has to make the save. Now more emasculated than ever, Eddie now plans to drop a tarantula on her. So he and Hat head into the school science lab to steal their tarantula. They almost get caught by the science teacher, so they hide in a cabinet. And the best actual scary tension in this book comes as the kids also have to deal with a live tarantula crawling around them. When the coast is clear, they manage to escape in time with the tarantula. However, it ends up being dropped in Molly's hair instead, and once again it's Courtney to the rescue.
And it's here where I suspect that Eddie may be a sociopath. He dreams up his next plan to scare Courtney. This time it involves a giant dog that will attack Courtney, literally go for her throat. She'll run off scared until he comes for the rescue. He hopes to get a real killer of a dog like a German Shepherd, but gets whiny when the best they can do is Charlene's St. Bernard Buttercup. They set everything up with the kids by the woods, Buttercup all foamed at the mouth, but when they see Courtney and sic the dog on her, the dog chooses instead to run off into the woods. Eddie goes to find Buttercup, but finds another vicious dog that scares him off. Soon, Courtney shows back up, now holding both dogs. Another plan is foiled, so now the kids decide that maybe that mud monster plan will actually work.
We get some backstory on the history of the mud monsters and Muddy Creek. Back in the olden days, there was the town above, and a town below. When a mudslide hit, it covered the bottom town, killing everyone. It's believed that those townspeople rise from the mud as a form of walking dead. The mud monsters then find their victims and drag them into the mud below to their dooms. Eddie and the others call up Courtney about the mud monster sightings with their plan to have her wander in the dark and be scared by Eddie's brother Kevin and his friends in mud monster costumes. Courtney and her friend Denise arrive as the kids get ready to put their plan in motion. And sure enough, here comes some mud monsters approaching them. Eddie thinks it must be Kevin and his friends, but Kevin and his friends arrive and tell Eddie that they hit a snag in their plans and couldn't help them in their prank. But if they're not the mud monsters, t-t-t-then who's that? The kids all scream, including Courtney and run off.
The book ends with really no twist. Eddie, Hat, Molly and Charlene are all still petrified after the whole incident. Courtney recovered pretty quick however and is still her perfect self. Eddie still wants to scare her, but he's too scared. Har-har.
CONCLUSION
I think my opinion for You Can't Scare Me! remains the same. I like that this book is more of a slice of life story, lacking in a lot of supernatural concepts. It's just kids being kids, which is something that I feel works better more often than not. What I don't like though is Eddie and his friends. They're not very likable, and not in the way a lot of Goosebumps protagonists are. Eddie's fixation on Courtney is legitimately concerning, morphing from simple revenge to fantasies of getting her mauled by a large dog. It doesn't exactly make me want to sit through this book. And I'll say despite liking the slice of life style, this one can be a slog in the middle with so many of Eddie's plans just being foiled, though the tarantula prank and the dog scare seem to be the ones with the most effort into them and the book does an okay enough job with the tension, though with how the book is set up, they make Courtney easily besting them a bit too obvious.
I still feel odd about Courtney. I think the book does make her too perfect, as in she has no flaws at all, which makes her a fine enough foil for Eddie, but when she's written to be loved by all and friend of all animals, she's a little hard to latch on to. Though honestly, even with that, she's still more likable than Eddie, which might be the book's point as well. If the book does anything right, it's set up the concept that wanting revenge is usually more trouble than its worth and you'll usually end up regretting it. In the end, this book is just okay. It breaks the mold for normal Goosebumps and has a nice ambiguous ending with the mud monster encounter, but the book can feel sluggish in the middle and the characters aren't the most fun to follow along. Any way you slice it, this book's a real stick in the mud.
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