NNtG: Ghosts of Fear Street #32: Caution, Aliens at Work

It's time to check out yet another Ghosts of Fear Street. We're very close to the end of the series at this point. This one, honestly, is one I always forget exists when I look through the list of books. It's that one that makes me go "Oh right, this one". Which on occasion with these book series it can often mean a hidden gem. Or, more often than not, it's just another book in a series with much better books. Which will this book ultimately wind up as? Let's get to work as we talk about Caution: Aliens at Work.

This cover is okay. Not exactly scary by any conceivable metric though, but I do like the designs of the alien tools as they fly out of the toolbox. We get a decent "shocked kid face" from our protagonist who I could see reacting that way to a bunch of flying objects. Like with the other CG covers, this one is endearing, definitely giving off that feel of "aged poorly but still kind of neat" that a lot of old CG images have. Decent stuff.

Our protagonist, Matt Eldridge, runs into his friends Ellen Reinhold and Jeannie Franklin, who tell him that the town statue of Shadyside's legendary civil war hero has suddenly disappeared without a trace. Matt doesn't fully buy the idea of a statue just disappearing in the night, and is more focused on getting an old toaster from his friend Jill Peterson as we quickly learn that Matt likes to tinker with things. As Matt arrives, he sees something orange land into Fear Street Woods. As he arrives, he hears a loud explosion and sees signs of something blowing up, but there's no ship. In fact, the only thing Matt sees is a strange orange box. As he spots which looks to be something slimy in the woods, he grabs the box, which gives him a weird "sitting on your arm for a bit" feeling which also causes the box to be stuck to his hand and won't come off. Ah the classic alien gag of supergluing a box and letting the dumb earthling grab it. What a jape.

Eventually the box falls off Matt's hand, and won't stick when he touches it again. He decides to head home, but because we need a story beat and he's a dumb kid, he takes the box home with him. He rushes to his room and opens the box, seeing that it's filled with stuff, more so than should fit a box that size. So a TARDIS situation. Inside are some strange objects. A weird looking pair of pliers, a flashlight with a diamond bulb, a strange remote, and something that looks like some sort of really weird rubber band. Before Matt can mess with them, Ellen shows up. Matt tells him about the tools and she immediately goes for the hammer, only to get zapped by them and nearly die. Deciding not to risk another electrocution, they tap the box with a baseball bat, only for it to emit another large spark. However, it turns out that Matt can actually touch the items. He decides to take a disk attached to a rubber band and put it on his head. It fits too well and gets stuck to his head, but there's a more interesting side effect as he can read Ellen's mind.

After the two bicker over the boundaries of mind reading, eventually they find a bead that when pulled, takes the headgear off. Now that they have the ability to put it on and off, Matt puts it back on and tests it on his four year old sister Sally, which annoys the child when he constantly guesses that she's thinking of Big Bird. Later that night, he finds a pair of goggles that he puts on which gives him X-Ray vision. And of course, his first thought with them is to peek into the girls' locker room because this kid sucks I guess. The next day he goes to take the toolbox to school, but Sally causes him to drop them. She gets shocked by the tools and whines about it, which gets Matt in trouble. His mom doesn't fully question why her son has a bunch of very strange tools, but I guess we'd get the "Because Goosebumps Parents" moment if we did all that nonsense. 

Matt takes the goggles and the disk to school with him, but it doesn't seem to work right. Instead of reading thoughts, his thoughts are amplified. Matt soon realizes that he brought the wrong tools to school since I guess the aliens didn't do that good job differentiating their mind readers and their mind stereos. They decide to mess with more items, including a monocle that makes Matt extremely smart. Being the idiot that he is, he brings the monocle to school, but the lens ends up setting his desk on fire. After that mishap, Matt ends up in detention. When his teacher, Ms. Murphy wants him to give her the toolbox, it springs open and freezes her solid. At first Matt thinks to keep her like this, but realizing he might still get in shit for freezing his teacher, he tries different tools, until he uses the monocle again which unfreezes her, with her having no memory of any of the prior events.

Now realizing the toolbox might be a danger and, you know, not just giving us more chapters of repetition, Matt and Ellen decide to bury the toolbox in Fear Street Woods. It's all for naught as it winds up back on Matt's bed. So Matt's next big plan is to just ignore it. Don't open it, don't acknowledge it. That's when he starts to hear a scratching sound coming from inside the box. It opens and a tiny pocketknife starts to crawl onto Matt, scratching him under his arm. He throws the knife back in the box and tells the box, which is clearly alive, to leave him alone. However, Matt soon sees that the scratch has now changed into a tiny hand. He tries to cut it off, but the hand grabs the knife and throws it, so that's not going to work. He shows Ellen his new hand and the two try to figure out what they can do about this. They try more tools (which honestly given the hand thing and everything else these kids are mighty dumb to keep rubbing alien tools on things) but nothing seems to work. They then find a button in the bottom of the box, which works as a pager, as a giant slimy slug monster soon arrives.

The slug, who never gives us his name, wants the toolbox back. Ellen tries to get the slug to give a reward, but that doesn't really pan out. When the slug grabs it however, he gets a shock, since it's now imprinted by Matt. It was originally imprinted by the slug, but when his spaceship exploded and sent the box flying, it I guess lost the imprint and it latched to Matt. But there's an easy workaround to this. Matt just has to die. But of course the slug has to check with his commander before he can go about committing child murder. After the slug leaves, Matt decides that maybe if he threw the toolbox in the middle of Fear Lake, that should do the trick. You know, despite the fact that he already tried this with the burying. They try that, only for the toolbox to shoot out of the lake and return to Matt. The next day, Matt's new arm is almost fully grown and if that wasn't bad enough, now two giant alien slugs show up. Both he and Ellen get caught by the aliens, but before they can kill Matt, they get zapped by a different alien with mushroom-like skin, an egg head, brown bug eyes, skinny arms and six fingers. Oh, and a blaster.

The alien, a female Xpilvian named Ziplitil, tells the two that the slug aliens are known as Denebans, and the two alien races have been at war for centuries. This has escalated to Earth where the Denebans have been studying humans. The Xpilvians have as well, but they're more peaceful compared to the Denebans who are more evil and dominant. She mentions that they plan to take Shadyside to their home planet for study, and to do so, they're using  a powerful dimensional compressor device that will eventually cause everything to be flattened. The Denebans have to be stopped, and only Matt can stop them given the whole, you know, imprinting and all. She shows the two a flattened piece of paper that looks like the stolen statue from earlier in the book, and she reveals that it IS the actual statue with the whole compression thing crushing it to ultra flat level. The device is in Fear Street Woods and has to be disabled by one of the tools in the box, only Ziplitil doesn't know which tool exactly. Oh and it's to activate in an hour so that also doesn't help.

So with Ellen and an injured from the earlier fight Ziplitil in tow, Matt heads to Fear Street Woods. However, two more Denebans show up and give chase. They evade them and make it into the woods where they soon locate the device in a bird's nest. It looks identical to the other eggs in the nest so that doesn't help. They use the Sprongi which is like a cheese grater with a zipper and buttons to try to stop it, but it doesn't work, as it's actually a different tool called a Shringi. They get the right tool just as the Denebans catch up to them. Ziplitil and the slugs fight for a bit as time continues to run out. Before Matt can work on the device, the slugs tell him that Ziplitil has been lying to them the entire time. To which they bring up a good point that if the slugs were the ones who flattened the statue then why is it in Ziplitil's possession? 

With no clue who to trust, Matt uses the mind reading device from earlier to see who's telling the truth. Sure enough, it's the Xpilvians who are the real conquerors and the Denebans the good guys. The flattening device is more like a prison cell that will flatten Ziplitil, hence why she's trying to get it disabled. Ziplitil reveals that she's a scout, sent to earth to bring the other Xpilvians to take over and wipe out the human race. She holds her blaster to Matt and tells him to disable it, to which he agrees to do so given he's being held at blasterpoint. But he manages to counter by whacking her with a hammer using his third arm. The device goes off and Ziplitil is flattened into a photograph. The Denebans thank Matt for his help and reveal that the whole statue thing was their fault, but not intentionally. They take back the toolbox, which I guess they can just do now, the imprinting stuff doesn't matter anymore? Okay then.

As the Denebans leave with Ziplitil, Ellen says that the aliens didn't give Matt a reward for finding the box, to which he reveals that they let him keep the third arm. Ellen wonders why Matt would want to be outed as a three-armed freak, but the arm can conveniently retract into his body whenever he wants so I guess that all worked out. 

This book isn't too bad, but I do think it's a book that's stronger in its second half than the first. I do like the concept of the toolbox, the weirdness of all of the tools and we do get some fun moments as Matt and Ellen try to figure out what things do. But I will say that the first half sort of drags because that's really all we get for about half the book is "Matt tries a tool and it fails when necessary". Once we get to the aliens and the big finale, it's actually pretty fun. With a decent enough swerve when it comes to Ziplitil. The book does a good enough job in building the Denebans up to be more untrustworthy and to build up Ziplitil as seeming like the one who is trying to save the day. Even though it's easy to tell that things like her having the statue doesn't quite add up. but the swerve does feel like it works and doesn't come completely out of nowhere. This is the second of Kathryn Lance's books for Ghosts of Fear Street and of the two offerings, I think this is a stronger book than Night of the Werecat. It definitely feels like a stronger take on a horror story and doesn't fully fall for a lot of the straightforward Stine trappings that Werecat did. 

Matt's kind of a dumb protagonist. His handling of the toolbox borders on pure stupidity. Namely when he tries using other tools to get rid of the extra arm, which by all metrics should just make things worse for him. And trying to get rid of the box despite it being clear that he can't (although I guess he can after getting rid of Ziplitil I guess?). I wish the book played more into the idea of him tinkering with things like the toaster as mentioned earlier in the book. Ellen serves as a solid secondary character. A bit smarter than Matt but also someone who comes up with dumb ideas. The Denebans work as solid red herrings with Ziplitil making for a decent actual villain. One who does feel enough like a threat by the end, managing to almost get away with everything had she been more aware of the whole third arm thing. No real Superfluous Clay characters in this one, everyone's either a side character, Matt's little sister, his parents, or his teacher, and all fit in the roles they need to. Maybe Jeannie. I thought she'd be more of a character, but she doesn't do enough to really fill the Clay role of the book. 

So overall, this was another okay Ghosts book. Definitely good to see the quality sort of keep consistently decent by the end of the series. And while this takes a bit to warm up to, ultimately I found this to do what it needs to and offer a solid enough experience. A definite recommend. And another case of "mediocre cover, actually good book". I like when that happens. When the opposite happens is when I really start to hate everything. We're closing in on the end of this series. I'm intrigued to see how we go out. But for now, Caution, Aliens at Work gets a B+.