Not Necessarily The Goose: Bone Chillers #2: Little Pet Shop of Horrors

WARNING: THIS BOOK DEALS WITH ANIMAL ABUSE. IF THAT'S SOMETHING THAT DOES BOTHER YOU, THEN BY ALL MEANS SKIP THIS ONE. 

Well, we've made it. One Hundred blogs for Raiders of the Bookmark. Now technically near half are old blogs moved over here, but the point remains. Uno Hundo. And what better way to celebrate than by once again diving into the bizarre world of Goosebumps clones. And what better book than one of the more well known clone series, Bone Chillers. 

Released in 1995, Bone Chillers was a series of books written by Betsy Haynes, whose other claim to famer were the Fabulous Five books. Honestly, Bone Chillers, of all the clones, is the one with the most success around it, even managing to get its own one season TV series in 1996 as part of Disney's One Saturday Morning. 23 books (24 technically with a French book) were released. And another thing they have in common is cover art by Tim Jacobus. So, does that equate to quality writing wise? Let's find out with Little Pet Shop of Horrors. A book that by cover alone I'm intrigued by (That usually bodes bad). 

COVER STORY

Holy hell this cover. I'm not a furry, I think, I dunno, ask me on any random day, maybe I am. But I can only imagine this cover was a key inspiration for a lot of furries. Maybe not so much the copy-paste kid heads on the animals in the cages, but Cassie, our protagonist, mid morph with the whole tail and paws thing. Amazing. Does a good job in setting up the horror of the situation while yeah, if this wasn't one of the things that triggered someone's inner fursona, then I'd be shocked. So, I've been told this is also a Tim work, which I guess I should have figured, so yeah, good stuff.

STORY

Cassidy "Cassie" Cavanaugh and her friend Suki Chen are surprised to see a new pet shop in town. Mostly on account that this was just an empty lot the week prior. But Cassie doesn't care, she wants to see what puppies are inside. The two check out the store, which has a poster that says "CUSTOM PETS. TELL US EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR AND WE'LL FIND IT FOR YOU. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED!!" but we're way too early in the book for the red flags to drop. The shop seems pretty barren with only a few dogs and cats. Cassie goes to play with one of the pups, but sneezes due to her allergies. The two kids then run into the store owner, a strange man with black, watery eyes named Mr. Willard. He offers Cassie a pet, but Suki drags her out before she makes an impulse buy. However, Mr. Willard promises she'll be back.

As they head to Suki's they run into four of their classmates, David Ferrante, Max Neal, Todd Cook and Ken Coffey. David's holding some sort of white box and the other kids want to see what's in the box. Cassie also inquires. Thankfully, this isn't a kid friendly version of Seven, it's a tarantula, which puts Cassie in a panic. Cassie and Suki try to make their leave with Suki doing backflips because she's a gymnast. Yeah, don't worry, I didn't forget Suki's two traits so far, her love of gymnastics and air conditioning. Cassie is paralyzed with fear of the tarantula, which David calls Igor. He got it from the same new pet store that the girls just visited. He ordered a tarantula and the owner gave it to him pretty easily, like the custom order sign suggested. After threatening to be tarantula'ed again, the girls make their leave.

The girls head to Suki's house and ponder on if the custom pet thing is true. If you can get whatever animal you request. Cassie doesn't want to wait, so she goes back to the store while Suki stays home and does gymnastics. Don't worry, she's doing plenty of gymnastics. Cassie returns to the pet store and once again peeps the sign. She asks Mr. Willard if there are any dogs that she can own that doesn't make her allergic. He gives her an order form that she can sign later and in a few days she'll have a shorthair dog that will do just that. Before she can leave, she gets attacked by a large black dog named Barracuda, or Cuda for short. The dog then calms down and almost seems to be warning Cassie about something when Mr. Willard drags the dog into the back room.

However, there is one snag in Cassie's plan to get a pet and that's her parents. Concerned about her health (Which is a step up from most Goosebumps parents so points there Betsy), they refuse to let her order a dog. She then returns to the shop, but is told she can't get anything without the order form. She checks on Cuda when she hears a ghastly wail in a back room. Like the sound of a cat in pain. Before she can open the door, Mr. Willard shoos her away. She heads into the restroom, angry about everything, ready to swear off this pet store of small size that may or may not contain a quantity of the horror element. Suddenly she sees David back at the store, mentioning that he accidentally sat on his tarantula. Okay, keep that in your back pocket. Or your front pocket in this case. 

As David's parents fill in a form for a golden retriever, Cassie begins to feel strange. Dizzy and hot. Mr. Willard shows up and offers her a drink. Which, you know, given this strange man with the watery unblinking eyes, he seems like the perfect person to trust with a drink. A drink of pink liquid. Cassie drinks it, like a fool, and feels even weirder. Then she passes out. When she awakens, she sees that Mr. Willard is calling her "Cassidy" and "Good Girl". She's in a cage with a collar around her neck. She tries to communicate, but it turns into barks. Yep, Cassie's a dog now. Well, now I not just have My Hairiest Adventure flashbacks, but, even worse, The Barking Ghost flashbacks. Oh dear. And I still have 97 pages to go. Cassie's situation gets worse as soon as she realizes who she's the custom pet for. David Ferrante. You know, David Ferrante. The kid who.. just sat... on his tarantula...  and killed it... the... tarantula... which was his custom... pet...

WHAT IN THE ABSOLUTE HELL AM I READING???

So, yeah. That's a thing that's happened in this book. But, unfortunately for Cassie, she's now David's pet. So, it turns out that David's also kind of a crappy dog owner. She keeps trying to plead her case, despite it coming out as barks, like to the point that she should get it by now, but it just leads to her being jerked off the couch by the neck. And Mr. Ferrante, who already seems like a quick to anger kind of guy, is ready to shut her up himself. David thankfully gets her out of the house before literal animal abuse. "The park'" thinks Cassie. There's kids there. Kids who will certainly know that she's not really a dog, but one of their friends. Well this book went from WTF to FFS super fast.

But before heading to the park, Cassie and David get accosted by a dog. Cassie instantly recognizes the dog as Cuda. While David and the man argue over their dogs, Cassie tries to get an answer and it seems she can at least communicate with him. But before she can get any answer as to how to fix this, Cuda and the man leave and David drags her to the park. After having Cassie drink from a puddle, he shows her off to his friends. When she doesn't fetch for him, he's straight up about to go all Ken Ichijouji and kick her. Hey, I make so many wrestling references, I was due a Digimon. But before he can haul foot into Cassie, Suki shows up to stop him. But when Cassie tries to get her to notice, Suki's afraid of her. So that doesn't help. I just imagine Suki backflipping her way to safety.

So, life's a bitch for Cassie the next few days (as in she's still a female dog). David does feed her some table scraps, but Mr. Ferrante, still high on rage-o-hol, gets angry and drags her to her dog food. So, yeah. Fun times. Things get more fun when Mr. Ferrante takes David and Cassie to Uncle Charlie's farm to teach her how to be a hunting dog. Doesn't go well as she refuses to retrieve any of the dead ducks. Thankfully though we are in a universe where the parents do seem to notice their child is missing and the news reports about Cassie's disappearance. Cassie tries to get David to get the hint, but he grabs her hard by the snout and threatens a muzzle. This book has gone from WTF to FFS to really, really uncomfortable.

So Cassie's next big idea is to just straight up wreck David's room. Surely that will get the hint. Nope. Obedience school is where Cassie's headed next. Oh good. This is going to get worse. The instructor is a man named Bruiser who tells the class to keep their dog still and not bark. Cassie then sees Cuda and tries to contact him. Suddenly Bruiser violently grabs her by the collar to stay, but she reacts by biting him. She then gets cracked in the back of the head and passes out. Oh good. It did get worse. There's about fifty pages left. Like, seriously. It's been a while since I've been in tap out territory. But we press on.

Cassie's got a bad headache, but she does come up with some sort of plan. In the backyard, she writes in the dirt. HELP! NOT DOG! GIRL! Probably the smartest idea she's actually had since this ordeal began. Doesn't matter, they just think she made a mess and force her to sleep in the yard. She tries to dig out of the yard, but destroys the flower bed, meaning that she's on her way back to the pet store. She's taken back to Mr. Willard who is pretty peeved she blew being a pet. So he takes her to the back room. Oh, not to be turned back to a human girl, but to be put to sleep. Meaning that meow we heard earlier, that was a child turned into a cat that was killed for not acting like a cat. Which happened after a kid was turned into a tarantula and squashed under a boy's butt. WHAT THE HELL AM I READING??

As he prepares the syringe, Cassie tries to escape, but he shuts the door on her. She evades him and hides the syringe on him, but he just fills up another one. She manages to dodge him in time to cause him to leave momentarily. She sees a window and tries to climb up, but knocks over another bottle of pink liquid. She drinks it and it just reverses everything. She's back to being her human self again. She gets out the window and runs off. She hears the sound of a cat crying, realizing "oh crap. There's probably a lot of kids this guy's kidnapped." But she can't do anything about it. She just knows she's never coming near that shop again.

TWIST ENDING

Cassie returns home and tells her parents that she had amnesia which caused her to vanish. I guess since they wouldn't believe she was a dog for a couple weeks. She calls Suki, but gets no answer. A few days later, her parents decided to give her a dog. One from the pet shop. It doesn't take long for Cassie to realize it's Suki because that dog can do one hell of a backflip.

CONCLUSION

Well that was quite the book. For our first taste of Bone Chillers, I will say we got a book that is a bit its own thing in terms of horror and definitely a book that takes cues from Stine's style. There's definitely a constant sense of tension and worry given throughout the story as Cassie becomes a dog. It's met with some classic idiot ball, which coincidentally is the only ball Cassie knows how to fetch, but we do feel bad for her plight. A bit too bad honestly as the book borders on straight up abusive and dark. I can imagine that someone who read this book who had big issues with any depiction of an abused animal would come off really hating this book. Hell, even I felt that way. It takes so long to get to its point that it has to hammer you over the head (in Casssie's case literally) with just how horribly she gets treated. Which I guess is the only way to can tell this story in a horror setting. It just leaves you feeling gross.

As a horror story, there are some legitimately scary outcomes. Mostly coming from the pet shop. From the concept of the kids being turned into animals against their will to children being straight up roofied by some creepy store owner to him euthanizing them when they're brought back. And in the case of the kid who gets turned into a tarantula to die by being squashed. It sets forth a story that does have a horror element that works and sticks with you after the story ends. It's dark and maybe too disturbing for some kids, but doesn't go into overdrive like some of the Shivers books do. It's definitely a reverse My Hairiest Adventure with Mr. Willard being a reverse Dr. Murkin. We don't get any answer as to why he's turning kids into animals, but given it's clearly for profit, I don't think we needed a massive exposition dump.

Cassie is an okay protagonist. You feel bad for her by the end, given everything she went through. Although in my mind, I'd just imagine the next day her unloading a barrage of fists on David, even if he wasn't as bad as his dad, who has to be an abusive father, I just can't see any way otherwise. That leads me to the twist, which is kind of meh. It should have been David, not Suki. It would make more sense narratively that David may have went back to get dog Cassie, but ends up being caught and turned into a dog. At least some karma for what went down. It just feels like it's Suki so we can pay off the gymnastics stuff. In the end, this one was a hard sit through, definitely not recommended for most readers if this subject matter does bother you. But if you can stomach it, it's probably one of the more effective GB clones I've read so far. So, I'll give Little Pet Shop of Horrors a B-. Thanks for reading. Thanks for supporting the blog, and here's to 100 more to come.