boring ( )

Say Cheese and Die is the fourth book in the Goosebumps series and in this volume we meet four friends who live in Pitts Landing (Greg, Shari, Michael, and Doug) and as we join them they are hanging out in a driveway lamenting how lame (and incredibly boring) Pitts Landing is...as they wander down the street desperately trying to come up with something interesting to do...when they encounter the old Coffman house and decide that the best way to beat the days doldrums is to sneak into to this creepy and abandoned house and have a look around and that's when all the trouble starts.

Down in the basement they discover that Spider (a creepy homeless guy known around town for dressing all in black) is living there and Greg makes an extra special discovery...a hidden cabinet and a camera. When Spider unexpectedly crashes their little adventure the foursome scram out of there with the camera. Greg and gang figure finders-keepers...but there's something not quite right about the camera...every picture that Greg takes with it comes out wrong. It isn't until later that the group begins to discover just exactly how special the camera is and exactly what horrible fate is in store for them as a result of using it. Will they be able to right what is wrong? What will Spider do to them? You'll have to read to find out!

Overall I liked Say Cheese and Die, though it suffers from the same drawbacks that other books in this series suffer. The stories are so short that characterization is all but nonexistent and the build up happens really, really fast. I suppose that this is good, considering the age range for the stories and the ending does have the characteristic twist that Stein seems to strive for in all of his works. I give it a B+. ( )

The story deals with 3 kids who go into a house. They find a secret compartment wit a camera in it. They take pictures of the weird things that occur in the house. Read to find out what things they take pictures of and how it effects the characters. -S.J ( )

This story is about a group of friends who break into an abandoned house, find a camera that makes bad things happen when pictures are snapped, and a creepy guy determined to get the camera back. Greg, who picked up the camera, solves its mystery, but gets in trouble when he tries to return it. In the end the creepy guy gets what's coming to him. ( )