By which I mean Hitch manages to get a boa constrictor into Charley's room. She gets choked by the snake to which David and Eddie save her, all while Hitch is there, taunting her and the others. Charley passes out, wakes up, and doesn't believe David or Eddie about anything, thinking that somehow David put a fucking boa constrictor in her room. And that was it. That was the moment this book could go fuck itself. You have an interesting enough character in Charley, what with the goth stuff and all, but more importantly, she was Hitch's owner. There could have been more of a connection there, a reason to add Charley into this story, her past with Hitch playing a key role in stopping him. But NOPE! Can't have that. We HAVE to have David and Eddie be not believed in the most convoluted as fuck way possible and have Charley just gone from the story altogether. A means to an end to keep with the status quo of how these Goosebumps-likes are executed. Two kids involved in a plot that nobody believes them about, even if them having someone believe them and ultimately be on their side would have been a benefit. Especially, you know, a character WITH CONNECTIONS TO THE FUCKING VILLAIN! Which sucks because there are some decent things in the book, but it's hampered by so many bad decisions and one that stands above them all that even after all this time I still can't comprehend how the book managed to fumble the easiest bag ever.
#02: 99 FEAR STREET: THE SECOND EVIL
Normally when I cover trilogy books, I lump all three into one section. But what we have here is a case where one book in a trilogy was bad enough that it deserved to be singled out. For the most part,
99 Fear Street is a decent trilogy. The first part focusing on a cursed house that tries to kill a family, and inevitably does just that in killing Cally Frasier and her younger brother (and their dog because it's Stine of course he was killing an animal), while leaving the story open to continue with her sister Kody being the survivor who has to fix this and stop Cally from turning evil herself. And the third part does just that, albeit a bit sloppily by turning the house into a set for a movie based on the events of the first book. All well and good. Enough that it could have maybe been a Super Chiller. And I say that because what the fuck was Stine smoking when he came up with the second part?
The second point focuses on an entirely different family, The McCloys, and mainly the son Brandt, who has a strange condition that the book holds off against mentioning until the end. All we really know is he's very brittle. He is also a flirt who gets his multiple love interests almost killed by constantly inviting them into, you know, the house of evil. All while Cally is in the shadows, falling in love with Brandt and trying to kill him so they can be together, even though it's established this kid sucks rocks. But she can't kill Brandt because his condition is that he's already dead because his archaeologist dad pissed off a villager on a jungle island, so the villager tried to poison Brandt's dad, but killed Brandt instead, so his parents brought him back to life by having a witch doctor kill a random drifter and put Brandt's soul in the drifter's body, but the drifter eventually returns and extra kills Brandt, so the family just leave and the story progresses and oh no I've gone cross-eyed.
This is such a wild concept that I don't fully hate, even if it's soaked in obvious racist caricatures. But the fact that it's the second part of a three-part story that by the end doesn't play any important part to the actual story and could have been cut out and nothing would be lost is why it frustrated me enough to put it here on its own. Sometimes a book can just be a Super Chiller and that's fine, Bob. You don't have to pull witch doctor's out your ass so hard that it you scream "Ooh, Eee, Ooh, Ah-Ah!"
#03: BLIND DATE
"In fairness" feels like the first two words I should start with here because in fairness, this was Stine's first horror book. It was always going to be a mess in some form or fashion, but yeah, this one wasn't great. Mainly due to a very messy format, being way too long, and having a lot of the tropes that Stine will run into the ground later on. Whispery phone calls, a vague character who is perceived to be the villain but isn't, the reason for this boils down to a traumatic moment that the protagonist forgot about and nobody will just up and tell him why because this is a book, as well as our old friend "the villain is just a character with bad mental health". Add in giving us a protagonist that seems a bit too constantly shat on, with a whole subplot about Kerry injuring a popular football player from his school and the player's friends constantly trying to kill him, only for that to not matter by the end and we just move on from it. Like I said in the blog, this didn't need to be 200 pages. So while it's still worthy enough of being called one of the worst I've read, I'll be a bit fairer to it because Stine does get better... though when you boil it down, not really by that much.
#04: SHARK NIGHT
Stine's new standalones have been disappointing for the most part. I'll talk about both notable Blackstone books, but for now we're talking about his latest and why it bugged the hell out of me. There is a logical plot here. Liam's mom is a TV producer who wants her big hit project. And by a convoluted series of events, Liam winds up in a shark cage, lost at sea, then put in a wacky series of events which sees him and his sister Rosa having to escape a resort hotel for like half of the book, all while nobody once tells him what's going on until the end, and we end on it all starting again. Like the most annoying tale of Sisyphus ever. And annoying is the best way to put this. It's a book with a plot that goes at a breakneck pace, never letting anything be exciting. And for a book called SHARK NIGHT, you barely get any sharks until the one scene with Liam in the tank and like one other scene.
As a thriller it's not that thrilling, with very little shark action and more running in a hotel for the majority. Every character but Liam is shit, from his sister Rosa who seemingly wants him dead for... reasons, to his mom to Swan the guy who was supposed to be in the shark cage but faked an injury so that Liam would end up taking his place for, again... reasons. It's a book that offers little of the shark action you want and is more just a bland parable about "hey, isn't the entertainment industry shit to kids?" I mean, it is, but there were better ways to tell that story, Bob. This wasn't it. It's the antithesis of everything I liked about the Camp Nightmare twist. In that, you could at least say it was to benefit Billy for the expedition to Earth. Here, nah, let's just fuck with Liam's head and not let him in on it because his family fucking blow chunks. As does this book when it's all said and done.
#05: SLIME DOESN'T PAY!
Sometimes waiting for something just isn't worth it. In the case of Slime Doesn't Pay, this was a title that came from a Goosebumps contest, which was left sitting in the ether for almost 30 years. And out of nowhere, in 2022 it was announced that Slime Doesn't Pay was finally getting a release in 2023... only not for Goosebumps, but for Blackstone Publishing. And what we got was one of my least favorite books in a while. Especially from Stine. Granted, this came before Shark Night which I hated more, but this was a very close contender. The plot being about a girl named Amy whose brother Arnie is a real piece of shit. Abuses her, wrecks her stuff, writes a swear word on her head before picture day. But her parents won't do anything about it, nor will they really explain why Arnie sucks so much until the very end because this book's twist is so bad, even for Bob. Ultimately Amy and her friend Lissa make a blue slime and splash it on Arnie during his birthday party. But then he turns into a monster and causes a rampage. Not because of the slime, but because he was always a monster who could turn human, Amy's parents just, you know, couldn't be assed to tell their daughter the truth about her abusive brother until the plot demanded it.
Ultimately this book isn't the worst case of this kind of plot from Stine. But then you realize that it's a 200 page book, even if many of those pages are filled with illustrations. Unfortunately, even with cool art pages, it doesn't save this book from feeling like a wheel spinning slog for the majority, where Amy has to deal with Arnie doing horrible thing after horrible thing after horrible thing for so much of the book that when we get to the sliming, it's so late game that it doesn't even feel all that special. Especially since the twist of the book is that the sliming actually WASN'T all that special aside from the plot convenience of the glue used for it causing Arnie to stay a monster forever. I think if it fixed a lot about itself it could have been a mid-tier Goosebumps book, but the end result we got is Stine at his sloppiest.
#06: THE MYSTIC'S SPELL
Shivers didn't piss me off this year. No talking about forgiving genocide, so that's a plus. So my pick is more for a book that underwhelmed me more than it pissed me off. I think because it feels too safe for this type of story. Give a kid the ability to get wishes and have the plot be that every one of them fucks up on him for seemingly no real reason. Other than I guess Myra just like screwing with people? Like Clarissa only not as seemingly obvious. So you have Timmy wish to be strong and the book goes down the obvious avenues that this type of wish would go, with Timmy being so strong that he makes shit worse for everyone. Your standard buyer beware parable. Which, again is fine, but this is Shivers we're talking about. I've seen how fucked up this series can get. You give us super strong Timmy, I expected him to be snapping arms and stuff, not breaking an arcade game and wrecking the principal's car. The twist is also definitely a twist that happens. Far from the worst of Shivers, but still a book that I wish could have been more exciting.
#07: THE GREAT PUKE OFF
Is it really fair to put this in? I mean the point of me reading this is more an intentional dive into bad books. But, I mean, given what I read through with this book, it's kind of fair to consider it one of the worst reads of the year. Because holy hell, was this worse than I expected. You want a gross bodily function? We got damn near them all. Piss, shit, snot, vomit. All the colors of the puke rainbow. All mixed with a plot about kids wanting revenge on the awful snob kids who are the assistant principal's children. When a key factor for your book is shit from a baby diaper, then really there's no turning back. No un-washing your brain from what you've read. I know I'm going to have to read more eventually. But, like, for serious, SEVENTEEN BOOKS!?
#08: GHOST KNIGHT
So, this didn't piss me off like the other Deadtime Stories addition in the list, but if any book felt messy enough to add to the pile, it was probably either
Ghost Knight or
Cyber Scare. I went with
Ghost Knight. I like some ideas, and the titular Ghost Knight is a cool villain. Setting it in a country club that just up and took a haunted castle from England is a bit silly, but in the right way for these types of stories. What I don't like is that the book kind of feels like a lot of build and not enough action. A lot of sizzle that overcooks the steak. Because the ending feels super rushed, and the whole "believe in your heart" stuff doesn't really matter when, in the end, it's someone else who saves the day, not so much Cory and Ben, our protagonists. If it cleaned itself up better and had a better twist other than "oh, that's happening now, I guess", this would have been better, but for what it is, it underwhelmed big time.
#09: BEWARE OF THE PURPLE PEANUT BUTTER
Disappointed. That's the word I think pops into my head when I think of Beware of the Purple Peanut Butter. Because it really doesn't offer that many fun concepts, especially with its shrinking path. There are a few, but not enough to really make me feel all that wowed by the concept. I do like the second path with the protagonist being giant, but I also feel like that's already old hat for Goosebumps given that Stine already did this with Monster Blood III. So what we get is a book that I really feel doesn't have the oomph that its iconic cover offers, nor does it have as many really memorable bad endings. Not even any spider related endings, which you'd think would be a gimme for this concept. Nah, have a net thrown on you instead, that's a real scarer.
#10: THE CATALUNA CHRONICLES
I covered the remainder of the Fear Street three-parters this year. And while 99 Fear Street had that lump in the middle, Fear Park turned out to be really decent. And in between those two was this fucking dumpster fire of a three parter. I wanted The Cataluna Chronicles to work. A Christine-style story involving an evil car seems like something that Stine shockingly hasn't ripped off all that much. Like here and The Haunted Car for Goosebumps. And you'd think "Okay, story about an evil car that corrupts and kills its owners", pretty straightforward. But then you start to read these books and realize "oh fuck, this is a mess" really quick. Because while we're dealing with three un-connected stories in the present, all involving this car called the Cataluna, we cut to the late 1600s where a girl named Catherine is being accused of being a witch and hunted down to be killed. Turns out she is a witch, but the point remains it's the other people being shit to her first. Even being betrayed by the boy she loved. So she gets revenge by killing him and his father, but his brother William vows revenge.
And if a story about a witch girl and a boy hunting her in the 1600s was the book, it would be fine, but you'd wonder how this connects with a story about a haunted car. And part of me thinks Stine hit the mother of all walls to connect both together because smack in the end of the second part we learn that Catherine's mother was a witch who decided that raising her daughter in the age of witch hunts was a smart idea, so she created a time travelling car and went to the past and leaves Catherine with a couple who hates her for being a witch, because, I must reiterate, it's the late 1600s. But wait, it gets dumber, because Catherine (and William who is stalking her) go into the car and travel to 1994 and die. Now Catherine's ghost haunts the car and lures people to their death because despite being an innocent victim, the book needs to make Catherine evil, even though I really don't give a fuck about William getting revenge because, again, this is all their fault for pissing off a witch. So we get like one based thing where William possesses a teen girl named Marissa, who gets into a relationship with a boy named Buddy McCloy who owns the car, so that he can get his revenge. And the book kind of just devolves into strangeness that ends on a "It was all a dream, or was it?" ending.
There are elements I want to like about this, even the "sort of by proxy even if it's possession" trans coding of the third book and Marisol/William. But the book feels like a madlibs of how to write a book, while also feeling like Stine was flying by the seat of his pants. And, I guess it's fitting this book is about a car because Stine hits a wall so hard you could mistake it for a car crash. I also just don't like the fact the first two stories in the present don't have much connection at all other than the spirits coming back to go after Catherine in the weird as hell climax. If this were a Super Chiller and cleaned everything up to a more serviceable degree, it could have worked, but as it stands it doesn't, making these three books my least favorite thing I read in 2024.
And that was the worst offerings of 2024 in terms of book blogging. 2025 looks to be a shitshow in the making, and I'm more than certain there will be ten more books to make the year even more unbearable to sit through. And I hope you'll join me on that ride, or at the very least watch on as I struggle to survive it.
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