This is actually the first goosebumps book I ever read! And boy was I caught off guard when I started.
The plot, the characters, and the twists really amazed me the most!
Truly a book worth reading!(I'll never forget how scared I was when I finished! I honesty believed the book was real!) ( )

Amazon lists the age range for this series at 4-8, but I cannot imagine a 4-6 year old who would really be able to enjoy this on their own...or would really want this read to them, this stories are more involved and require a slightly higher level of sophistication on the part of the reader. I'm thinking the best age range for this book (and probably the series) is 8-14, with the 10-12 age range being ideal. ( )

Amazon lists the age range for this series at 4-8, but I cannot imagine a 4-6 year old who would really be able to enjoy this on their own...or would really want this read to them, this stories are more involved and require a slightly higher level of sophistication on the part of the reader. I'm thinking the best age range for this book (and probably the series) is 8-14, with the 10-12 age range being ideal.

This is our first encounter with the Goosebumps series (my daughter is 8) and I'll probably hold off for another year (ish) before I hand these over to read. I understand that Welcome to Dead House is one of the better (and more creepy) books in the series, and while I think it's a fine kick off for a series of horror stories aimed at 3rd-6th graders, this is a little much for my child this year. She's reading her way through the Mostly Ghostly series, which is slightly simpler in presentation while still maintaining the same horror flavor that Stein seems to be famous for.

This particular volume, we meet Amanda and Josh (and their parents of course) who have just inherited a big old house in Dark Falls (love the town name), from an Uncle they didn't know they had. Dark Falls is a town that where no one ever seems to be out and about in the day and where there always seems to be lingering shadows. Right from the start Amanda notices things that seem off about the house and the town, but no one else seems to notice. Slowly over the summer, they make friends with the local kids...or so they believe. As the summer draws near Amanda and Josh learn something quite gruesome about the other residents of Dark Falls and just how they came to live in the dead house!

This is quite creepy and does contain a few genuine thrills and chills, I found myself wanting to keep turning pages, hooked on finding out what happened next (and I'm 35). It's not as well written as some other horror I've read, but Steins style is certainly not the worst either. I think Welcome to Dead house is a promising start to this series and I'm looking forward to reading through it! Next year, when the Girl's reading level increases, we'll definitely be adding this series to her list! ( )

The first R.L. Stine book I ever read, and also one of the first really scary stories I ever read, this book had me very alert and creeped out the entire way through. Awesome book! ( )

This is the first book in the series, so I'll begin by talking about the Goosebumps series as a whole. Early on, Goosebumps was a pretty good series- not all the books were excellent, but there were some with good plots and interesting ideas (Welcome to Dead House being one of them). As the series progresses, however, the ideas get more weird and silly than just scary. Rather than gain depth, it gets shallower as R. L. Stine puts out about one Goosebumps a month in addition to writing Fear Street and various other works at a furious pace. Every book we meet up with the same pairing of two kids, a boy and a girl. Our narrator is always freaked out but trying to act cool, the main character is always dumb about telling their parents about weird phenomena (which generally goes especially poorly because the characters tend to be jokers), and, overall, many of the main characters simply aren't likeable. Goosebumps does not have the depth that many other ghost stories achieve either in the stories or in the character backgrounds, so it really needed to not get into plot ideas that were just silly, as in many of the later books. I read Goosebumps 1-50, so those will all be appearing here as I reread them.

Welcome to Dead House is definitely one of the better stories. A family "inherits" a house from their great uncle and moves in. The house is large, but seems to be haunted and the town is kind of... dead. The kids get together with the other kids every day, but the kids disappear every time it gets sunny. A trip to the cemetery reveals the problem- all the kids are dead! Everyone in town, it seems, is a member of the living dead, and they need one family a year to feed on. The kids escape them, and expose the whole town to sunlight by knocking over a tree, killing all the undead and freeing their parents. The clincher is when the daughter tells the people moving into her house, "I used to live in your house." ( )