It's time to wake up to another trip to Bone Chillers. And it's fitting to talk about sleep as we have a book involving beds, and the monsters that may or may not reside underneath them. Which does oddly feel fresh for this blog. We've covered a lot of monsters residing in most areas, but rarely from under the bed, which was always a common trope. So will this be a sleeper hit, or do we just sweep it back under the bed? Let's talk about The Thing Under the Bed.
Otis Farnsworth is gross and a pig. That's the sentiment coming from the first chapter. He eats a lot, and he even eats in bed. Like, not just maybe like a candy bar or a glass of milk, but milk, cookies, pie, a chicken leg. Reader beware, you're sleeping on crumbs. Also, despite eating so much, he's still rail thin. So he's the Bone Chillers equivalent of Jughead Jones. Of course, eating so much makes him feel uncomfortable when sleeping, but that's oddly not why he's having trouble sleeping. Normally he sleeps fine enough on his giant waterbed which he dubs the Ocean of Motion. His parents won it in a raffle and he's had it since he was ten. God, remember waterbeds? I'm sure they still exist, but I remember them being everywhere. But Otis has gotten more careless with his bed, often dumping stuff under his bed and around it. Also it's gotten so bad that his room stinks because at this point would it surprise you?
We open the story with Otis hearing scratching noises under his bed and his voice being called. Turns out the voice is his mom and Otis overslept. She notes the smell of his room makes her want to "whoops her cookies", which is a term so dumb I also wanna start using it. But she tells Otis that she wants him to clean his room after school. Otis notices the mess under his bed, including a moldy cheeseburger, and says that he'll totally definitely get to cleaning this room up and leaves, not before hearing the scratching sounds again. At school, Otis teases his friend Tony Mozzelli with a chocolate bar and not even offering him a bite because he's hungry. Though given how gross this kid is, Tony is lucky not to touch his food. Case in point Otis' book bag that emits a foul odor.
The kids head to their math teacher Miss Tibbetts' class and Otis gets in trouble for trying to eat a Peppermint Patty in class, so Miss Tibbetts forces Otis to open his book bag and put it in, to which Otis grabs inside and feels something squishy and moving. This ends up revealing his bag is full of worms. The school custodian, a man named Baldwin Halloran, cleans out Otis' bag and notes the worms, saying you can't be too careful with worms. Otis returns home and is about to start cleaning his room when he notes that he doesn't have any air freshener. So his mom heads out to get some. Otis checks his room, noting the rotten burger is still there, but he also hears something else moving under the bed. He takes care of his baby sister Rita for a bit before going back to check after hearing more noises. When he returns to his bedroom, the floor is clean, save for some mold, similar to what was on the burger he saw from earlier.
As Otis tries to figure out what's up, Tony shows up. Otis tries to tell him that there must be something under his bed, like a bogeyman, which is always weird for me to see is spelled that way. Always thought it was more Boogeyman, but I guess semantics. However, Tony doesn't believe Otis because... I mean, it's still early, and there's really no reason for Tony to believe him. So I can't just say "Because Bone Chillers friends" or something. However, they soon see that Tony's book bag gets covered in mold. It then gets eaten by something under the bed that gives off a wicked belch, which is Tony's cue to am-scray the hell out of here. So Otis spends his time cleaning his room and spraying as much air freshener in the room to get rid of the smell. But he's both afraid of whatever's lurking under the bed and stymied as to what he can do about it. Also he doesn't tell his parents, which puts him up there for one of the more logical protagonists in these books.
Otis calls Tony later, looking for any advice as to how to deal with whatever is under his bed, to which Tony brings up that Otis' bed was won in a raffle and donated by someone. So likely whoever owned the bed before might be able to explain what's under there. Luckily, Otis' parents know that the former owner was a biologist. A biologist who was very concerned about the bed, but also very vague as to why he was concerned. They get the note from a Dr. Harold Ezekiel Balderon, who says that he did happen to spill one of his worm tanks under the bed, so there might be some in the bed, but it's nothing that a little bug spray and a priest couldn't solve, I'm sure. Otis then remembers his book bag was filled with worms earlier, so maybe that might be part of whatever's under his bed. He wakes up the next day with his mother mentioning tucking him in and leaving their cat Muffin in his room. Also Otis' schoolbooks were eaten by the thing under the bed.
At school, both Otis and Tony get in trouble for not having their homework. Instead of going to the principal, Otis drags Tony home to try to find the home number of Harold Balderon, but gets no luck. So instead Otis thinks they need to lure the creature out from underneath with something, before noting that Muffin hasn't been seen lately, or at least since being in his room the previous night. Somewhere Stine got excited at the prospect of a cat being eaten alive. I'd like to imagine he loved Alf. The kids take the outside garbage and fill up the upstairs hallway with it, in hopes of luring it into the bathroom. It starts to work and the boys see that the creature is a giant worm-like beast with green eyes and a monstrous maw. The creature roars in a rage over something upstairs, which is cue for the boys to book it to the basement. Otis had filled the bathroom sink and now it was overflowing, to which they figure that the creature must hate water.
The worm emerges from the top of the stairs, ready to chow down on the boys, but thankfully they find some stockpiled food jars and use them to create a trail to the washing machine, which the worm begins to follow, all while turning anything in its path into strange mold. They manage to distract the worm long enough for it to get splashed by the washer and, sure enough, it causes the worm to freak out and quickly melt away, with the items that the worm had eaten showing back up. But before the boys can celebrate, Otis' mom shows up, furious at both the big mess, and her son playing hooky after he was supposed to go to the principal. Tony makes his leave, and despite Otis' best efforts, he's now in trouble and has to clean the big mess. Oh and Muffin's okay. The cat never got eaten by the worm. Somewhere R.L. Stine must have fucking boo'ed this book if he read it.
After cleaning the house, Otis checks the news and learns that the custodian Baldwin Halloran was arrested and was actually Harold Ezekiel Balderon this entire time. See, Balderon was a biologist from the local university who was in deep trouble with feds for violating federal environmental law with his experiments that he was doing at home. He had escaped prison and had been hiding at the school under his alias. Otis' parents then show him his old book bag, the one that had been thrown out, the one that Dr. Balderon had cleaned out, now suddenly back on their doorstep. So now Otis is in a panic. Did Dr. Balderon send him back his bag now filled with more monster worms?
Instead there's a note from Dr. Balderon who says that he knew that Otis was the one who inherited the bed after seeing the worms in his bag. His note originally said that bug spray or freshener would be good at killing the worms, but instead it makes them more vicious. He promises that, despite his situation, he will one day be recognized for his genius creation of garbage-eating superworms. But until then, he'll manage. He does ask that Otis doesn't get his worms wet as water could be bad for them. So, in other words, Dr. Balderon wasn't trying to do much... EXCEPT PLAY GOD!!!!
Otis is a decent protagonist. Starts by being overly gross to an almost comical level, mainly in how the book describes him constantly eating everywhere. Interestingly the book cuts that short super quick once the focus goes more on cleaning the room and dealing with the worm. Which I can definitely approve of. You don't have to pound a book into the ground with gross-out stuff, and we're already dealing with a giant monster worm, so stacking more grossness kind of cancels each other out. Tony is a decent side character. Never feeling superfluous. Him being there to help Otis defeat the worm adds for some good banter between the two.
Dr. Balderon is interesting. I do like that we don't reveal who he is until the end twist, but it also feels way too obvious that Baldwin Halloran seems like a perfect alias. To the point that even Otis should have guessed something after Baldwin's "Can't be too careful with worms" comment. I like the worm as a monster for the book. Just the right amount of nightmarish in its description and feeling like a threat throughout the story. But, like I said, it does feel like it's too easy to defeat. Almost falling into the same trap of How to Kill a Monster in that something so easy can destroy it. But I also get that it's a flaw from Balderon's experimenting. And, if given the chance to, he would have tried to find a way to make his garbage-eating worms invincible. So I can't be too bothered since it's all in the name of a mad science story.
So, overall, this one was decent. Can't say it's a top tier book as it does feel very part and parcel with a lot of these kids horror books. And does feel rather tame in concept and execution, especially for Bone Chillers which we've seen can go pretty damn hardcore, especially with Betsy behind the wheel. But it also didn't do anything too bad to not have it be a light recommend at the very least. The Thing Under the Bed gets a B.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.