Attack of the Jack-O'-Lanterns (Goosebumps #48)

## Put one head in front of the other...

Halloween provided this series with some of its best stories, and Attack of the Jack-O'-Lanterns repeated the mark of quality. Its hero, Drew Brockman, is also one of R.L. Stine's funniest and most relatable and real narrators in the entire series.

[N.B. This review includes images, and was formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

Neighborhood brats Tabby and Lee count bullying our heroes (and, well, everyone) among their favorite pastimes, and, worst of it is, they cruelly pranked all the neighborhood kids on Halloween night a couple years earlier. Drew, Walter, and the twins Shana & Shane have been fostering Halloween revenge plans ever since -- no one gets away with ruining the show more greatest of all holidays! Grrrrrr!

Drew growls a lot, too. She's tiny in stature, with elfin features and elfin nicknames to accompany her looks. She and her friends are tough and verbal about it -- maybe they even overcompensate a bit. But they're fun, likable -- spastic -- heroes.

Two ghoulish figures with flame-lit jack-o'-lanterns for heads sneak up on Drew, Walter, and the two brats for a night of trick-or-treating. We're to assume they're the twins, but something isn't quite right with these two. The creepy pumpkin-heads are cruel, and things quickly escalate away from their revenge plans as the group is pushed into the forest. To top it off, these 'friends' just sound wrong, with deep, rasping, cruel voices. Wasn't there something about people disappearing from town recently, too?

It's a tremendously fun Halloween yarn. The sense of creeping mystery -- whether we're being pranked, or led by monsters or what -- is upheld to Stine's trademark twist ending. That, coupled with the quirky, original characters telling this story make Attack of the Jack-O'-Lanterns among the best Goosebumps books of the entire series.

R.L. Stine's Goosebumps (1992–1997):
#47 Legend of the Lost Legend | #49 Vampire Breath show less

Unlike my usual in-depth reviews for books that I read, I'm going to keep this one fairly short.

This book is pretty hard to rate. Mainly because it is very clear that I am not the target audience, since Goosebumps is a book series written for children ages 7-11. The series is famed for being accessible horror for children because the horror it presents isn't really traumatizing so much as goofy, surreal, and likely to scare a child. The monsters have their intent, but for the most part, the children go along with the terrors because they feel powerless otherwise.

Yet, I enjoy it from time to time as an adult because these stories are quick reads for me now. As a child, I loved them, and they took me all day to read. As an adult, I can show more whip through a book in about an hour or two, and it gives me some nostalgic tingles that remind me of days gone by, autumn winds, and the smell of cookies and hot chocolate on the weekend.

Now, there are a lot of good Goosebumps that I personally think still hold up, even for an adult reading children's literature. I don't think this one is one of them. As an adult, I felt that it was... tropey, with a lot of things in the narrative that didn't add up, or feel quite right. Usually, that's not a problem because the basic formula for these books goes "Set up" which leads to "a few fake outs" to "monster shows up" to "a few chapters of dealing with monster" and ends with either a happy ending, or a twist ending. Mr. Stine likes to write each chapter with a cliffhanger, too, which, as an adult, gets annoying, but as a kid, I remember it kept me hooked, so I can forgive him for knowing how to write for his audience. Kid me had to know what happened in the next chapter, so I kept going.

But what I think even kids who read this book (and trust me: Children are smart and perceptive) probably won't like are several storytelling devices that completely ruin the narrative. Let me explain the first one:

The first one comes from Drew's daydream. There's a chapter where she's envisioning her friends trick-or-treating, and they somehow end up in a creepy old house with old people who collect trick-or-treaters. The chapter starts off as a continuation of the previous one, and at the start of the chapter that follows the one where she and her friends are kidnapped, it's revealed that it was all a dream.

I feel that even children would balk at that anticlimactic middle. Not only was it a complete cop-out of any narrative tension, but it was wholly unnecessary and mainly there to pad out the thin plot. It had no bearing on the story at all, and if it were removed, nothing would change.

But even that pales in comparison to the ending, which I'll spoil below:

So after the pumpkin-headed monsters force the children to trick-or-treat for eternity in a neighborhood that none of the characters had ever seen before, the kids naturally get tired and want to go home. Then, the entire neighborhood comes out of their homes, all wearing jack-o-lantern heads, carrying four more meant for the kids. Drew and Walker watch as the pumpkin heads get slammed onto Tabitha and Lee, who are let go and run into the night, scared that their heads have been replaced by the pumpkins.

And then it turns out that the pumpkin-headed monsters are Drew's friends, the twins Shana and Shane. Also, they're aliens. They have alien powers, and the entire neighborhood is an alien colony.

WHAT A TWIST!

For real, though, that ending just felt like another cop out because there are no mentions of aliens anywhere else in the book, and it felt like it was made up out of left field. At no point was there any hint of what the ending would be, other than a callback that was wholly unrelated to the incident. I know that it's a children's book and that a 40-year-old man shouldn't really expect much from it, but I actually felt cheated out of a proper ending.

Overall, the book really only gained its stars because it's a Goosebumps story. If it were any other author, it would have been a 1-star. But because I know R.L. Stine is capable of writing good stories and this is the 48th book in the series, I'll cut him some slack for maybe running out of ideas.

Overall, really only get this if you can get it in a bundle, and even then, save it for a boring day, no matter your age show less

[b: Attack of the Jack-O'-Lanterns|1801072|Attack of the Jack-O'-Lanterns (Goosebumps, #48)|R.L. Stine|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1359209350s/1801072.jpg|2161988] was a bit too much of a children's book for me to find entertaining. In [a: R.L. Stine|13730|R.L. Stine|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1194380070p2/13730.jpg]'s words, it was "babyish." The plot was very superficial, the actions frankly ridiculous, scares nonexistent, and twist nonsensical. It was a mess of a book, an I'm surprised that there are people out there who really got into it. I mean... the Creature of this book is essentially this:



A group of kids obsessed with Halloween have, for the past two years, been shown up by two other kids. Once this included a show more rather cruel joke of a fake breaking and entering, the second time it was simply those two kids not showing up to the Revenge Party that had been planned. This year, however, will be different. This year, they WILL scare those other kids. Apparently with pumpkin headed monsters. Or something. TRICK OR TREAT FOREVER.

Can you see my eyes rolling from there? Jack O' Lanterns just aren't that frightening. Even the concept of pumpkin headed monsters just doesn't do it for me. I don't know if it's really just stupid or if I was just too old for it, but for me, this book fell flat from start to finish. show less

Drew and Walker are still furious about a dumb Halloween prank neighbors Tabby and Lee played on them two years ago. This year, they enlist siblings Shane and Shana to help them get even. The prank they come up with is far more elaborate than Drew thought it would be.
Seriously dumb until the revenge prank is set in motion.

Fun book. Read it to my son who had just turned five. He was scared by the pumpkinhead element, which I played down a bit, but otherwise, he enjoyed it, specially as he loves Halloween. Not Stein’s best book, but fitting. Personally, I wished for a stronger ending, but for the audience this was written for, it worked.

During this book, it talks about how a boy named Drew is spending his halloween revenging on a group of kids who played a joke on him the year before, but he didn't realize this would involve two real life, scary pumpkin heads. I recommend children reading this book because it is kind of scary and it is a good book to read during halloween.

Drew and her friend, Walker, have a plan to get back Tabby and Lee for freaking them out on Halloween a couple years ago. They go trick-or-treating together with them and two pumpkin-headed people join them. It seems like it might be their friends, but when the pumpkins come off, it's obvious there aren't normal kids under there. The pumpkins keep the bunch captive until Tabby and Lee completely freak out and run away. It is then revealed that they were just the friends of Drew and Walker- the alien friends who can morph their bodies.