Face to Face with a nightmare!”
The Haunted Mask (Goosebumps #11) by R.L Stine is a middle-grade horror novel about a girl named Carly who gets picked on for being a chicken-shit. Tired of everyone always mocking her, she decides that for Halloween she is going to get the scariest costume around and scare everyone else for a change.
While I was reading this instalment, the biggest thing that popped out at me was the fact that there was an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that was eerily similar to this, although the episode was much more entertaining because it had Spike and Angel being totally cute and badass.
Anyhoo, while I liked this volume, I didn’t feel like it was the most brilliant of the series so far. It entertained me with some of the cheesy olden-time insults and classic costumes, however it does start to drag in some parts, making it feel longer than it needed to be. I also didn’t care for Carly’s tendency to get scared all of the effing time. It becomes annoying super-fast.
All in all, it’s a good, classic type of Halloween tale and scare, but it’s about as average as you can possibly get. It’ll make for a decent spoopy books for young readers.
2.75 masks outta 5!
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I love reading Goosebumps when I was in primary school. I remember devouring them as soon as they hit the library shelves but eventually I got to a point where they just weren’t enough and I moved on. As fun as these books were as a child reader there just isn’t enough in them to make them an interesting read as a teen or an adult. Fortunately a lot of R.L Stine’s other books, like the Fear Street books, worked for a slightly older reader. Ultimately though, he’s definitely an author I loved as a kid but outgrew.
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Some of them definitely don’t hold up well, but I think they still work for kids books. There are a couple, though, that even as an adult freak me the heck out, lol.
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Funny thing. Once upon a time I was tutoring a grade school boy who was falling behind in reading. They threw a stack of books and hort story collections and suggested I start there. I read a few of them myself and was already familiar with others thru my son and daughter. Every one was depressing in some way. A brother gets eaten by wild dogs. The last wolf is killed horribly after seeing its mate and puppies killed. A girls is given the third degree after her tribe runs away from slavery in a Spanish mission and she stays behind. A girl is taken from Earth where she loves the sun and the desert to Venus where it perpetually rains. On the one day the weather forecast is sunny, her classmates lock her up in a closet so she can’t see it. Etc.
I dug up my kids Goosebumps and soon he was an avid reader. Gotta wonder about modern education.
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Indeed! The best teaching methods and tools, from my experience, are the unconventional ones.
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Omgggg I am obsessed with goosebump books. I have a whole collection on my bookshelf. Now I want to read them again
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They are awesome. Some of them are sooo creepy though. The one with the ventriloquist dummy is one I still can’t read because it freaks me out haha.
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Omg the night of the living dummy is a classic and my all time favorite. I made sure I got all three volumes that included the dummy.
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It’s sooo creepy haha. It reminds me of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that also had a dummy that killed people haha.
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I think it’s cool that you go back and review this, I think these are great for younger readers, and yet parents who grew up with them would rather have their kids read Harry Potter and the like. So thanks for keeping these alive!
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I’d rather give my kids Riordan’s books and Goosebumps over HP anyday.
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