Readers, can I share something with you? When I was a wee lad, I was very afraid of Ernest Scared Stupid. Like, I would leave the room during the climactic scene where...I think a troll is turning people into little statues and needs to be destroyed with...milk? Am I remembering this correctly? Anyway, a few years ago I went back and watched that movie again (there might have been drinking involved, yes) and...well, let’s just say that it didn’t exactly live up to my memories. Not that it wasn’t...interesting...in its own way. But that let’s be real it’s not what anyone should consider good. But why share this charming anecdote? Because ONE DAY AT HORRORLAND was one of my favorite Goosebumps books when I was little. Something about it just...well, I was a fan. But reading it through now is quite a different experience. Not that it’s terrible. It does a few things that aren’t the worst, but it’s a large step down from last month’s awesomeness.
Oh, and hey, to be all appropriate about this I’m drinking a Berry Weiss from Leinenkugels, which one of the very first beers I drank (after I turned 21, even, because I was a good kid). Like the rest of today’s adventures, it’s...not very good. But I can drink a lot of it without really feeling it. Forward!!!
So the lead in to this book is actually pretty substantial. Lizzy is a young girl out for a day trip to a zoo with her parents, younger brother Luke, and Luke’s friend Clay. By now you know my fan theory that younger sisters just don’t exist in the Goosebumps universe. Best to just accept these things and move on. But anyway, gender roles occur and the family seems to be lost on the way. And like really, really lost, driving through some sort of desert with no knowledge of where they are or how to get to this zoo. And kids are just the worst. Especially Luke, who apparently likes to tickle and pinch people without provocation. Things in the car get tense and the dad seems about ready to drive them all into the desert to die when they stumble along a sign for Horrorland. Thinking that at the least they can get directions, they pull in and get of the car. Readers, the car explodes.
So the lead in to this book is actually pretty substantial. Lizzy is a young girl out for a day trip to a zoo with her parents, younger brother Luke, and Luke’s friend Clay. By now you know my fan theory that younger sisters just don’t exist in the Goosebumps universe. Best to just accept these things and move on. But anyway, gender roles occur and the family seems to be lost on the way. And like really, really lost, driving through some sort of desert with no knowledge of where they are or how to get to this zoo. And kids are just the worst. Especially Luke, who apparently likes to tickle and pinch people without provocation. Things in the car get tense and the dad seems about ready to drive them all into the desert to die when they stumble along a sign for Horrorland. Thinking that at the least they can get directions, they pull in and get of the car. Readers, the car explodes.
In perhaps the most jarring signs of You Shoulder Just Fucking Run, the car explodes and leaves the family stranded at this weird, lightly populated theme park. Where there are no phones. Where the employees are all dressed as monsters. And where Luke reeeeally wants to spend the day. Deciding tha this is as good a place to die as any, the parents agree to look around and maybe find a phone (ah, the days before cell phones made all of this pointless). So the family enters and almost immediately the kids are sent on their way while the parents try to find someone in charge. The kids quickly find that this park is not fucking around. It will bring them to the edge of death and harvest their terrified shrieks for the amusement of others and leave them charred husks to be binned with the sawdust and stale vomit.
Now, I do still like the rides aspect of this book. They’re not as cool as I remember (and tbh they’re not as cool as ESCAPE FROM THE CARNIVAL OF HORRORS!, which is pretty similar but does things just a bit better), but they manage a good variety and the creepiness does build and build as the kids make their way through the gauntlet of rides and attractions. Namely, the park begins more and more to play ricks on them, making them feel things that cannot be there, or at least that their eyes tell them couldn’t be there. Spiders crawling on their legs that leave no evidence. Bats that swarm them only to disappear at the faintest light. Something is Going On and Lizzy at least starts to really sense that they should be going. Of course, Luke is a little shit and just keeps egging them all on.
Which is an area where this book slips a bit back into Goosebumps’ standard misogyny-by-way-of-horror-tropes, having Lizzy’s very reasonable concern get dismissed as being afraid of the faux-scary park. When really, THEIR CAR JUST BLEW UP! Some fear seems like it would be pretty okay to express at a time like this, and while maybe I could see this park as being a bit cathartic, embracing that fear to a ridiculous degree in order to exorcise it, it’s just a bit disappointing that Lizzy gets shoved into the wet blanket role while Luke gets to be the bastard calling everyone else a scaredy cat and pretending to be brave. The book does not really punish him for his arrogance, where it certainly had for girls put into that role in the past. It _does_ allow Lizzy to be “right,” I suppose, which is nice, but she doesn’t really get to gloat about it. Things just keep on escalating and escalating while she frets that things here are not what they seem.
Until the other shoe drops. The parents return and say they’ve been assured that the car situation “will be taken care of.” Because yeah, that sounds legit. They go on another ride only to hate it and nope out of it and want to leave. Only...they’re not allowed to. And the park and all its employees seem to turn on them. Only for (dramatic pause because wtf moment incoming) the employees to reveal that the entire adventure at the park has been a hidden camera show for The Monster Channel. The family will get a brand new car out in the parking lot, as long as they can survive being attacked by a horde of monsters. Ready-set-go!!! I do appreciate how quickly things just completely hit the fan in this book. It’s a bit goofy but it’s also very Goosebumps. In fact, if we’re grounding these books by their similarities, this one is very much in the same vein as THE GIRL WHO CRIED MONSTER. Why? Well, because it plays with the same idea that the world has a hidden side to it filled with horrors that most people just don’t see or chose to ignore. Because this hidden camera show does exist, but it exists for monsters, by monsters. The employees of the park are all monsters and the family, by stumbling in, are now not allowed to leave. Welp, time to die, I guess. The horde is coming for them and the family is out of options. Only Lizzy remembers that the park had signs throughout it about no pinching. Which, okay. But as the park turned out to mean everything on its signs literally (the death threats, mostly), she figures that the pinching thing must be important and starts pinching monsters, who...deflate. Let that one sink in for a moment. In this universe where monsters live among us, perhaps the only thing saving humanity from complete annihilation is a completely fucking ridiculous weakness that monsters have to being pinched. A weakness they then put on GIANT SIGNS so that everyone will know NOT TO DO THAT, OKAY?! Sigh...
I do admire that the book commits to something so...weird. Because with this power unlocked, Lizzy and her family are able to make it to the parking lot (no new car, though, boo) and steal a bus and drive straight to a police station. Oh, wait, what? I’m being told that actually, they just drive home because they apparently know where that is and can get there no problem and the giant monster conspiracy that they stumbled across is like...okay now? Maybe even better than okay, because when they do return home, there’s a monster waiting for them to...give them a season pass to next year’s Horrorland attraction. Sweet, a bribe!
So you know what it’s CONSPIRACY TIME!!!
I’m almost unsure if I can even call this conspiracy time, though, because it’s basically canon now that monsters exist all around us (to the point where they have their own cable television network with millions of global subscribers). As we saw in THE GIRL WHO CRIED MONSTER, they tend to spread out and keep to themselves, blending in and defending their territory with brutal efficiency. So it makes sense I guess that they have something that they can all enjoy as a community that doesn’t require them to be in the same place. It’s a rather nice point, that they’re all bonding over the terror of humans, when really a part of them must be the terrified party, dealing with this weakness that at any moment could leave them a withered sack of skin. In many ways what this book does is give these monsters another reason to feel kinda sorry for them. I mean, their theme park is not popular. They don’t live close enough together to really justify having something like a park for them to play in. It’s just really lost humans that show up. And sure, you can explode their car and torture-scare them, but it’s just not the same. I’m starting to really feel that the true victims in this world are the monsters, who have been defeated by the march of technology and are now just sort of trying to retain their dignity in the face of a truly embarrassing weakness. So sad...
Anyway, for me the book does a decent job with thinking up some spooky rides (though tbh ESCAPE FROM THE CARNIVAL OF HORRORS! did it better) and further explores the mythos of the monsters as introduced in THE GIRL WHO CRIED MONSTER and was touched lightly in other books. It’s fun, though Luke is super annoying and the book lacks much of the subversive elements that I was hoping would stick around. Seeing as how they were likely unintentional the first time, that makes sense. Still.
Let’s break it down by the numbers!
On the “Would I write fanfiction scale of greatness”: 3/5 (It’s not the characters that interest me from this book but rather the expanded setting and the idea of these monsters. I want to write what other kinds of shows they might have, and what they might be like around other monsters. That there is this completely global network of monsters is one of the most creative, imaginative things that Goosebumps has done, imo, and it’s a shame that it’s basically untouched, just mentioned and then ignored after that. I wonder if there is some sort of group that monitors the monsters, or if they’ve largely been able to stay off the radar without human assistance. Just a weird, fascinating idea that I’d love to play with more)
On the “Is this actually good scale of more trying to be objective”: 3/5 (So this book has its moments. It’s certainly not the worst of reads, and it does build things up for a while. The scares-that-might-kill-you aspect of things is pretty great if underwhelming at times, and I think the book knows when to just go all-out strange. It’s fun, mostly, and it doesn’t do too many things that made me want to throw it at a wall. It’s a very Goosebumps book, with all that means)
On the “Yeah but this is Goosebumps scale of relative wonderment”: 3/5 (I want to rate this book a bit higher for nostalgia’s sake, but I have to admit that this was a bit of a let down. It could have done something a bit more interesting, and the book could easily have dropped most of the being lost in a car with family parts. Given, that set up the motivation to accept the sketch-as-fuck Horrorland as a viable option, but I don’t really need a reason when it’s a Goosebumps book. As it is, it manages to avoid being terrible and it expands a few things I think deserve to be expanded. I’m excited to see if any future books pick up more of these threads)
And there you have it. Join me next month for another...uh...”scary” installment! Cheers!
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