The Stinal Countdown: Goosebumps Series 2000 #06: I Am Your Evil Twin

Prepare for trouble and make it double. It's another trip to Goosebumps Series 2000. A book series that remains one of the more bizarre enigmas in the Goosebumps series. And we got clones to deal with this time. Sometimes that can give us something unique. Other times, the twist becomes obvious before you even enter the book. Can this one deliver or am I being two timed? Let's talk about I Am Your Evil Twin.

COVER STORY

I think when it comes to Series 2000, this is the cover that seems to always pop into my head first above most of the others. Not really sure why, but I think maybe because it works so well to sell the concept of the book. I like the idea of using a broken mirror aesthetic to show both forms of Monty. The real one and the evil twin. One shrouded in bright light, the other one in intense dark shades. Very simplistic as well, which worked for The Haunted Mask and certainly works here. Good stuff.

STORY

Montgomery "Monty" Ward is moving with his mom to his Uncle Leo's old place. Monty's father died before he was born and Uncle Leo just recently came back into his family's life after six years, so Monty's not too familiar with him just yet. He also knows that his uncle is a bit of a mad scientist, known as Professor Matz. He's known in Mortonville Pennsylvania as someone who secretly performs experiments. He has a daughter named Nan who Leo mentions is good at sports and is cool, and shares the experience of being a kid who has a dead parent. But she's at music camp, so too bad for Monty. And even worse for Monty is having a nightmare about being on an operating table with someone in a doctor's uniform about to slice him open with a scalpel. Reader beware, you're in for malpractice.

Monty returns home for the summer after his constant nightmares. When his mom literally heads out to the jungles of Borneo, he's brought back to Leo's where now Nan is here. Like, what an odd first chapter. Leo gives Monty a pin shaped like an eight point star, but when he goes to pin it on Monty's shirt, Monty tries to grab it, only to be jabbed by it and start bleeding. After a near case of attempted stigmata, Monty eats some donuts with Nan, only to start feeling sick and vomiting because this is Series 2000, where 2000 times the scares just means 2000 times more puke.

So, why the sudden regurgitation? Well, the donuts were made with peanut oil and Monty has an allergy. So I guess we can be glad he just puked since that's not an allergy to screw around with. After cleaning up in the bathroom, Monty then notices a strange room in the hallway and inside is a metal door. But before he can enter, Uncle Leo shows up and tells him to stay out of the base-err, room in the upper floor! After rollerblading with Nan and her friends, including a girl he finds more interesting named Ashley, Monty asks about the upstairs area as there are a ton of rooms up there. Nan says that the house used to be a hotel and that the rooms hold all of her dad's failed experimental mutants. And Monty, mark that he is, falls for it.

So, Monty really hates his first name of Montgomery. I mean it does sound like the name of a flea market that's just like a mini-mall. He pesters Nan with alternate names like Dave or Paul while she's more busy watching Twilight Zone the movie. He goes to get popcorn, but then overhears Uncle Leo in his lab calling someone insane. Before he can investigate, Nan tells him to come back and that maybe he was just talking on the phone. The next day, Monty starts at Taft Middle School, which given school's been in a month already makes him worry. But more curiously, his teacher, Mrs. Eckstat claims that Monty's already been in school. 

Monty then has his first murder-free piano lesson. And despite all of this, he has to be part of the school assembly in one week. He passes by the lab room again and hears someone yelling to stay out, but this time the voice isn't Uncle Leo's. Uncle Leo then steps out of the lab and says that despite the voice disparity, it was him and nobody else. Certainly not a twin of the evil variety that could be yours, Monty. At art the next day, Monty thinks he's close to being better friends with Ashley, while also noticing annoying bully Seth Block being real proud of the volcano he made. In the midst of Monty and Ashley getting along, Monty accidentally spills paint on Seth's volcano, getting him in trouble with Seth. After school, Monty returns to the art room, only to see everything destroyed as if by a baseball bat, including Ashley's sculpture. And Ashley says that she saw Monty do it. I mean, what other explanation could there be? An evil twin? Get out of here!

Monty ends up at the principal's office. Though despite this being his first time in detention ever, the principal, Mrs. Williams, says he was already there earlier. As he cleans up the art room, he sees his reflection in the window. Only his reflection isn't reflecting him. But before he can investigate, he gets yelled at to keep cleaning the room. As he heads home, he gets attacked by Seth and the others for destroying everything. The next day fares no better as again he sees his "reflection" in the window. So this time Monty leaps out the window to chase after it. However, his double disappears yet again, and Monty gets in trouble for, you know, jumping out of a window with seemingly no provocation as far as anyone else can see. 

Later, Monty asks Uncle Leo if he has a twin. Leo says that he does, but not any evil identical twin, but rather that Nan is actually his sister. Okay then. When Monty and Nan's mother gave birth to the two of them, Leo took care of Nan to help with the concerns of his sister not being able to support two kids. But he never told Nan any of this and was waiting until she turned thirteen. When Monty tries to bring this back to the identical Monty, he says that it must be a complete coincidence. Pay no attention to the clone behind the curtain. Nan gets clued in and is confused that her entire life was a lie, but doesn't seem super angry that her mom acted like her aunt for all of her life, but given that they stayed in touch it wasn't like she totally tried to avoid her. As they talk, the phone rings. The voice on the other end tells Monty that his life is about to get much worse real soon. Whether they were a raspy voice on the other end is up for debate.

It's time for the assembly and Monty soon sees that his music notes are gone. As he sees the door of an open supply room, he gets shoved inside and locked in, with a bottle of some sort of chemical leaking and emitting smoke. Monty manages to get up to a small window to breathe, but as he looks out the window he sees Nan talking to him. Only that's not him. That's another him that looks like him. So now Monty's convinced that he indeed has an evil twin. After he escapes, he manages to see the evil clone destroy the piano at the assembly runs into the other Monty who doesn't outright say he's his evil twin, but says that he's better than the original and is out to make Monty's life a living hell. And he does so by spray painting a car then running back to Uncle Leo's. 

When Monty gets home, Nan blames him for the piano smashing. Monty begins to suspect that hell, if the two of them are actually twins, maybe this third kid is their triplet. And the only way to get that answer is in Uncle Leo's lab. They enter and sure enough find a piece of paper called "The Future of Cloning" by Leo E. Matz. So, this second Monty isn't a twin, but Monty's clone. And then Monty remembers that Uncle Leo stabbed him with the pin. Maybe he was trying to get Monty's DNA so that he could create a clone. They then see Uncle Leo. Four Uncle Leos. And like, not the Simpsons joke either, four actual Leos.

Uncle Leo pretty much cops to cloning Monty. He wasn't really doing much... except play god! He pretty much admits he doesn't care about the wellbeing of Monty when science and the miracle of cloning is far more important. The kids try to escape, but the four Leos grab them and throw them in a room with the actual Uncle Leo. He says that a while back he began his cloning experiments, but they soon overpowered him and locked him away. It wasn't him who cloned Monty, but rather one of the Leo clones. Oh, and that whole scalpel dream earlier in the book? Not actually a nightmare. That was how they got the DNA. Reader beware, that's too far, man!

Oh, and it's not just one Monty clone, but several. Nan's joke of mutants in the guest bedrooms was actually true too. Leo says there's at least one way to tell a clone from an original. Each has a small blue marking on their thumb. As they talk, the Leo clones take Monty with them and tattoos a blue dot on his thumb. You already know the twist, so do I, but let's keep going. Monty manages to escape the clones of both Leo and himself and manages to free Nan and Leo Prime. Monty then gets caught again by the Monty clones who give him an initiation by burning his hand with a Bunsen burner. While it hurts him, when the other clones do it, they feel no pain. 

Monty tries to escape later, but the clones catch him again. However, this time, Nan shows up with three of Leo's roommates from college. They find the real Leo (who would only know his roommates because I guess the clones don't retain memories) and says that they will take the clones with them to their lab in South America. You know what the twist is. So do I. But let's keep going. And, as expected, they don't know who the real Monty is. We get our "I'm Spartacus" moment which leads to Nan picking one of the clones. So, Monty's screwed is what we're getting at. 

So, with life in a South American lab looking bleak and the truck arriving to take the clones away, Monty decides that maybe all the clones should just rebel and try to escape instead. As they escape however, Monty gets hurt, which means that the clones know which one's the real one and they again attack him. The clones get put in the truck which starts to drive away, but in one last hope, Monty leaps out of the truck and manages to make it back to Uncle Leo's. 

TWIST ENDING

Monty tries to protest that he's not the clone and his last hope is the donuts fried in peanut oil. He bites into one... and doesn't react. The other Monty eats it and pukes. Double your puking, folks. But we get another extra rankle here. With the ending now in Nan's POV, she later learns that the Monty we were following at the end is another clone so of course he couldn't have been affected. And the Monty who passed the test is a clone, but learned so much about him that he faked being sick. The actual Monty was still in the truck, still on his way to South America. You knew what the twist was. So did I. But at least some effort at the end? 

CONCLUSION

I Am Your Evil Twin is just okay. Nothing out and out bad about it, but also nothing that makes it stand out all that much from so many other evil twin stories. You knew this was where we were going, that we were going to have our "I'm Spartacus" and our "testing to see who's real with the clone still winning" ending. And that's really what keeps it from being anything other than just average. I do like the story in some places, but feel Stine either rushed in others or hit a wall in making other things matter. Like the whole Nan being Monty's sister thing. You'd think that would play more into the twist, but nope. It really feels like an addition that Stine hit a wall hard on. Which is a shame.

Monty, at least the Monty we follow, is an okay protagonist. Nothing ultimately special aside from being the good kid who gets screwed in the end. A victim of things that he can't control. Literally as in he's being set up constantly by evil twins. Though, with that thought in mind, wouldn't the evil twins still have to deal with, you know, all of the sabotage at school, pissing off bullies and likely having to pay for a damaged piano? Yeah, congrats. You got rid of the original, but now you have to pay for the mess you put on the original's life. And if you act out of turn then people will know you're a twin and the real one might have ended up in South America. Congratulations, you win absolutely nothing! And like, Nan also knows now. You win even less than nothing! As for Leo and Nan, they're fine I guess.

There is definitely a minor Stay Out of the Basement feel to this book. Not much, but the secret lab and clones, down to the possibility of the clone winning all feel like they're taking from that book. Though not cribbed too hard to allow it to breathe. Only for that breath to also come with plenty of vomit. Scares feel minimal, but the action of the climax still works for some harrowing moments. And the twist is the twist, nothing special, but not infuriating like these almost always are. The little addition of us following another clone at the end is at least an attempt, Stine. I'll give you the participation trophy there. And switching the POV briefly to Nan at least kind of works to add to the twist. But to be fair a lot of this felt like Stine straining to make the pieces all fit and going "eh, close enough".

So, I Am Your Evil Twin is a fine enough book, but ultimately lacks something to really make it feel more special. Compelling in places, confusing in others, underwhelming in even more others. It's still a light enough recommend, but don't go in expecting anything super fresh and unique. It truly is Clone-ly at the top. I Am Your Evil Twin gets a B-.