A Case of the Bumps: Hair Apparent

My Hairiest Adventure was the 26th book in the original Goosebumps series. Released in 1994, the book seems to have a mixed reception to it. Fitting giving it's in one of the more interesting eras of the books where the quality was starting to roller coaster a bit. They can't all be Phantom of the Auditorium or A Night in Terror Tower. Even before I actually read the book myself, I bought into the idea that this was one of the worst books. Now? I think it's kind of a hidden gem, which holds both a strong set of twists and the right level of gross horror. So for this edition of A Case of the Bumps, we're giving a deeper look into My Hairiest Adventure and giving more love to ol' Hairy Larry.

#1. THE PLOT

Larry Boyd is your seemingly average kid, despite a lack of sweat glands. He practices with his friends in their garage band when they come across an old bottle of Insta-Tan lotion in a dumpster. Despite it being expired, these dumb kids apply the lotion anyway. Soon, Larry begins to notice that his body is rapidly growing hair. And despite his attempts to get rid of it, it grows back faster and faster. But that's far from the strangest part as his friends Manny, and Lily disappear, their homes abandoned and their parents disavowing that they ever existed. Though Larry notices a dog with two different colored eyes and a pendant around its neck just like Lily's. Eventually the hair growth becomes so rapid that Larry's parents reveal the truth. He's not really their son. He's not even really human. He's a dog. The town he lives in is a testing lab run by Dr. Murkin, which was experimenting on dogs to turn into humans. However, it soon wore off, and Larry and the other kids turned back to dogs. But despite being back to having a dog's life, Larry notices his owners bring in a baby with cat eyes. 

What's interesting about My Hairiest Adventure is that it's a plot that does feel like the idea for the twist is important for the plot to progress properly. A lot of times you can tell when Stine comes up with a twist by the end of the story, or when he has a twist but can't put it together. This is a rare case where it feels like the puzzle pieces fit. And while yes, it's a bizarre setup, it always keeps moving with Larry's plight with his hair growth, and the mystery that seems to surround what's going on. Which is why I think it deserves more love than it gets because it has more of the genuine vibe to a kid friendly horror that, while it does go into very bizarre territory and could even be looked at as Stine's first puberty allegory in Goosebumps, it still doesn't fall apart in its narrative. It's the rare solid structure. Maybe slow in places, but otherwise it doesn't collapse in on itself.

#2. SHINING, GLEAMING, STREAMING, FLAXEN WAXEN

Despite the cursory belief from many, Goosebumps isn't a book series that goes in on the gross too often. You'll get some creepy bugs, or a lot of barf, but rarely do you get the kind of gross that makes you feel creeped out (Well, unless it's Revenge R Us for other reasons). So making the horror be about uncontrollable hair growth works great. Especially for a kid who likely hasn't started puberty yet, so the idea of hair anywhere but on the top of your head can be a messed up visual. And the book provides just enough moments where Larry's constant hair growth feels gross and disturbing, but never going too far. You're not getting scenes of Larry getting hair in his food or anything. Though, given the growth and all, it's not out of the question. And even the concept of someone being covered in itchy hair that keeps growing and covering your body, making you itchier and more freakish looking works so well in the horror intended for the book. Stine actually tried here.

So, like i said about how Stine (or the outliner) structured this book better than most, I think the Insta-Tan is his best misdirect. One that doesn't feel like a ripoff when the boom drops. Yes, there should be far more deeper concerns about putting expired lotion on someone since that can't be healthy in the slightest. So it works well as a reason for Larry's concerns and the first half of the book focusing more on Larry believing that the lotion bottle is the reason for everything. Even if the ultimate reasoning is just because he and his friends are all dogs. Speaking of which...

#3. OKAY, SO SHE'S A DOG

The most contentious part of this book for most is the dog twist. Because it's definitely up there in terms of feeling like a random way to end the book. For many, the story just ends with them being dogs with a feeling of an explanation as to why it happens. Granted, I think most of that does come from the episode which lacks most of the context needed from this story. But honestly, if you read the book and not just skim, you can see that Stine put the effort in to make this work. Lily has two different colored eyes, which is something that animals like dogs can have more than humans. Not much to think of there, but there's also Larry not having sweat glands and needing to have treatments from Dr. Murkin to help with that. Because despite being turned human, these kids still have that dog in 'em. And of course the growing hair as fur makes more sense. 

Although, I will say that one issue I've always had is that the story only sees Larry grow hair. No other signs that he's turning into a dog. I get why, because you don't want to telegraph everything to the reader, but still I do think the mild horror of Larry starting to gain more dog-like features, or even regaining certain dog-like things like colorblindness or a heightened sense of smell and hearing could work to be tiny little pieces to lead the reader forward. I get not revealing too much too soon, but when you already have a solid horror idea, it wouldn't hurt to have some extra horror beats. Though it would probably end up like Chicken Chicken where we have great body horror, but not much of a reaction to it.

#4. PLAYING GOD (WHICH IS DOG SPELLED BACKWARDS)

So what IS going on here? Why is any of this happening? What is with Dr. Murkin? Is he a good guy, a bad guy, or a neutral party who is pushing the boundaries of God's creation? What's the deal with this guy? I've always been of the opinion that Dr. Murkin is on the side of good, not evil. Though there's two ways to look at what the intent of this experiment is, a good and a bad. We'll start with why he might be on the side of good with this experiment and the laboratory town. My theory for this experiment is that this was an attempt to help parents adopt. If they can't get children through the standard adoption process, they can raise a child that was formerly a dog. The only thing is that they have to stay in the lab town, they can't tell the kids they're experiments unless it's too late, and that there's no guarantee that this will always work. 

And another thing what the book does well is building that bond between these makeshift families. When Larry's parents learn of his hair growth, it's not treated like a Goosebumps Parents moment, but they are genuinely concerned, but can't tell Larry or the reader what's up just yet. It also explains how quickly these families pack up and move on after the experiment fails and the kids revert back to dogs. They're heartbroken, but they can't do anything about it and they can't tell Larry either. Though on the plus side with Larry's parents, they don't just abandon their dog son, they keep him as the dog he was, given that the experiment is considered a failure. Though not enough of a failure for Murkin to try again with cats obviously. 

There is, of course, the other, more sinister reason that this could be going on, and that's that Murkin wants to create his own army of dog-humans for nefarious reasoning. I mean, if the experiment worked and kids could be cultivated from the project, what's stopping Murkin from giving it to the military to create their own breed of deadly dog-human soldiers? I mean we're already playing god here, so Murkin's plans being evil aren't out of the question. That too is the sign of a strong Goosebumps book when it leaves you wondering what the hell you just read, but still make you curious as to what the ultimate endgame of the story was. Again, Stine trying feels so weird.

#5. WAS THIS STINE'S IDEA?

I can't really think of where Stine got this idea fully from. I mean, I can't think of a major piece of media where a person is revealed to be a dog all along. Or at least done in this manner. I'll addendum if I find it. Maybe a bit from the original Teen Wolf movies with less of the werewolf vibe. But it definitely screams of Weed Stine, where his ideas feel like he's high on something when he comes up with it. And I do think this is one he came up with himself as it does have that vibe of classic era Goosebumps in its pacing and horror. But more importantly, it doesn't feel like it something that fits the normal outline. The parents not being oblivious is a dead giveaway to that. And an overall feeling that we don't land in the same trappings that so many books fall into. It still has some pacing issues, but overall does a better job in its intentions than most Stine works.

 Like I said when I did one of these for Why I'm Afraid of Bees, this is what I wish Goosebumps was more like. Bizarre science fiction horror mixed with freaky situations mixed with just the right amount of grossness. You don't get a lot of cases of Stine really pulling out all the stops to make some of the greatest books out there. Most of that is the grind and the junk food mentality that much of the series does feel like. So it is a shame when you don't get something where you feel him not being half-assed. When Stine uses his whole ass, sometimes his ideas can be creative. Though more often than not, it's the puberty allegory or a really lame misdirect, or YOU FINISH THE STORY. And I can prove this was done right, because there was one well known case where the dogs all along twist was a mess... 

#6. NOOK AND GRANNY 

Ghost of Fear Street's Don't Ever Get Sick at Granny's is still a book that I don't like. Not just for its twist which we'll talk about here, but feeling like too much of a torture porn that also feels like it loses any semblance of logic before the big twist, which while telegraphed, doesn't work as well given the context of the story. We have Corey having to stay at Granny Marsha's, who puts him through worse and worse situations, until it's revealed to Corey that Granny Marsha is insane, possibly from some sort of army experiment. Which would work fine enough as a horror idea, but the book then decides to just completely crap the bed in making this idea work. Because the book then tries to make things out to be like the Wizard of Oz with a focus on going Over the Rainbow and presenting Granny Marsha like a wicked witch. Only for none of that to matter because this was all the dream of a dog. Because Corey was a dog the whole time. Not a boy who turns into a dog. Just a dog. 

I like Jahnna N Malcolm's stuff. Most of their other books I've covered I've enjoyed and I do think they do a solid job on stuff like banter and building the adventure. But here, it feels like they just gave up in the concept of Granny Marsha being an experimented-on maniac and instead try to tie in the plot that it's the dream of a dog, despite nothing making sense. How would the dog know about things like a hotel, or The Wizard of Oz, or what a rainbow is since they're colorblind? Why would the dog's dream have them as a human child? If anything, the book reveals why My Hairiest Adventure works so much better as it's a book that always felt from the beginning that it knew what it wanted to be. That it had one endgame in mind and never pivoted. Here, it feels like there's a pivot and that there needed to be tiny things like Corey getting a belly rub to make it make some sort of sense. It's why it's my least favorite Ghosts book because you can tell that this was a book that, while no doubt there were great ideas thought out, the execution lacked the ability to make it work. So yeah, for those who hate the twist of My Hairiest Adventure, know it could have been handled much worse.

#7. CONCLUSION

My Hairiest Adventure is such a bizarre outlier book in Goosebumps that I think it's aged better than most of them. So much so that even my own perspective on the book changed over the years. Would I call it a top favorite? Maybe not. But in terms of OG series, it's in the top 20 at least for me. It's in the top 40 currently in my rankings for the whole series, so that's a point in its favor. It's the book that does the puberty allegory perhaps better than most, even if the pivot is more "dog kids" than the other reason for hair growth. It's a book with a twist and concept that makes you think more than most books do and is one of Stine's more well thought out science fiction stories that isn't just "evils of science", but then again it's so ambiguous that maybe it is him going full evil science again. I mean end of the day, Murkin is playing god here. Shame he didn't go for a half-human, half-ape creature because God Schmod, I want my Monkey Man!

The book falls perfectly into what I feel is the best era of Goosebumps in the first 30 books which, to me at least, always felt like the era of Goosebumps with the most memorable and unique ideas, even if most don't stick the landing. Less plagued with sequels, less samey outlines and executions, just the series still finding itself and even experimenting in strange ways. Goosebumps in its prime form. So while I don't think it's an out and out perfect book, My Hairiest Adventure succeeds in being one of the most memorable ones, regardless if you think the twist is one of his best or worst. And he got to sneak in a character's name being a reference to a pubic wig, so for that at least this is Stine at his most clever. Ain't that a rarity?