Night of the Living Dummy (Goosebumps #7)

After watching the new(ish) Goosebumps movie with Jack Black playing R.L. Stine, I felt an overwhelming wave of nostalgia crash over me. I remember avidly reading the Goosebumps series before eventually moving on to Fear Street, then Christopher Pike, who was at the cutting edge of middle-school terror. But Goosebumps always held a special place in my heart.

With an ounce of misgiving - what if it didn't stand the test of time? - I opened the classic Night of the Living Dummy. It's been so long since I've read any Goosebumps that I didn't remember anything, aside from a vague knowledge that Slappy was the main bad.

How. Could. I. Have. Forgotten.

The puking scene! The fact Slappy was the secondary character!

But I get ahead of myself. show more Night of the Living Dummy features a pair of twins who are a trial to their parents, who are oddly supportive of their pre-teen daughters taking up ventriloquism. I recognize that this is an actual talent, but I have to say, I'd be worried if I were a parent. Anyway, one of our twins finds a dummy in a dumpster and decides to become the queen of ventriloquism. The other twin gets jealous enough to coax her father into buying another dummy for her.

Then strange things begin happening, because this isn't Night of the Very Much Dead and Not at All Interesting Dummy. The dummies begin to seemingly move on their own and wind up in weird positions; the twins find themselves spurting awful, hateful things when they hold the dummies.

At the end, a conveniently placed steamroller manages to kill one of the dummies, but it's not quite over for the twins.

Is it cheesy? Oh yeah. Is it clearly written for pre-teens? Yup. Is it still crazy enjoyable if you have deep nostalgic feelings for this series? You betcha.

Despite the simplistic writing - which, again, written for pre-teens! - Goosebumps holds up. It's got just enough bite to still hold up after all these years, and a wicked sense of humor running underneath. show less

Increíble pensar que antes publicaban estos libros para niños como si nada pero cuando salió Harry Potter lo censuraron por diabólico? (say what).

Vi el capítulo de Slappy y Mr. Wood cuando estaba pequeña, y aún lo culpó por mi eterno terror a las muñecas de cerámicas (esas sonrisas *shudder*). Pero es primera vez que leo el libro... Y es más espeluznante de lo que recordaba.



Muñecos vomitando al estilo de El Exorcista, mordiendo niñas, sometiendo una familia a la esclavitud, diciendo insultos con voces diabólicas y ahorcando perritos. ¡Ahorcando perritos!

Las historias infantiles de antes si que eran hardcore.

## He walks. He stalks...

Before Slappy was around, Stine wrote about the evil Mr. Wood in the first Night of the Living Dummy. Everyone forgets about Mr. Wood. His story's forgettable -- his name, too. This first book of the famed Slappy saga is also one of the earliest Goosebumps books to feel lacking in narrative focus: Random things just sort of occur, and red herrings pop up to confuse the reader. Then it's over.

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

Night of the Living Dummy is about twin sisters Lindy and Kris, and the personal competitions between them. After finding a discarded dummy who Lindy names Slappy, the two girls take up ventriloquism to entertain their show more classmates and neighbors. Mr. Wood enters the picture as a second dummy meant to appease the twins, who otherwise spend their time fighting over who gets to use Slappy. Things quickly escalate with Mr. Wood, however, as he seems to have a mind of his own, threatening, insulting, and attacking the twins' friends and family under the guise of a ventriloquism act.

Mr. Wood, like Slappy in Night of the Living Dummy II and III, is a ventriloquist's dummy possessed by an evil spirit. Also like Slappy, he's not threatening, and the heroes of the story quickly dispatch him with brute force once he plays his cards and starts making threats. This is how all three Night of the Living Dummy stories progress, and this is the weakest, least-focused of them, with a downright bizarre deus ex machina of an ending.

My personal hypothesis is that Slappy only ever became the icon of Goosebumps (replacing Curly the Skeleton) because of the TV adaptations of the second and third books. (This first story was never adapted, and Mr. Wood subsequently forgotten as a villain.) Both adaptations greatly improved on their lackluster source material, and turned Slappy into a fun villain with a penchant for drama and physical humor.

R.L. Stine's Goosebumps (1992–1997):
#6 Let's Get Invisible! | #8 The Girl Who Cried Monster show less

The books in the Goosebumps series regularly seem to take the vein of a morality tale (of a twisted sort) where one virtue, evil, personality flaw, or issue is taken up as the focus of the story, and Night of the Living Dummy is no exception. The order of the day here is competition...in this volume we meet twins Lindy and Kris Powell who are constantly competing, arguing, trying out do, out wit, and one-up one another. Their parents are frazzled and fed up with these beautiful twins who seem to frequently cross the line into cruelty and viciousness, and often behaving without sympathy toward one another and others.

As we join them, the twins are exploring the house across the way from theirs when Lindy discovers a ventriloquist dummy show more in the construction dumpster...even better he appears to be in excellent shape. To Kris' horror, Lindy keeps the dummy, which Kris initially distains as stupid, gross, and boring. Shortly after finding him, Lindy manages to gain some skill and when her act becomes popular with their classmates...popular enough to get her some gigs doing birthday parties with her act, Kris decides that she too MUST have a dummy. Her parents initially rebuke her, dummies are expensive and try to get the girls to share which outrages Lindy...she becomes quite cruel toward her sister calling her a copy cat and really wanting this one thing for herself.

When their father manages to conveniently stumble upon a second dummy in a second hand shop for a good price, it seems like the problem is solved...but Lindy is still angry at her sister for trying to steal her thunder and begins to pose the dummy so that it appears to be alive, frightening her sister terribly...when the secret is revealed, Kris is crushed...but shortly after the dummy DOES come to life and the twins are left without their parents support (they are just fed up with talk and whining about the dummies to hear a single thing more about them). Will the girls be able to stop Mr. Wood? Will he make them his slaves? You'll have to read to find out...what you get is always different than what you expect with these stories, and Night of the Living Dummy is no exception, it does have a signature "got ya" moment at the end.

Overall, Night of the Living Dummy is well written and the characters are simple but adequately written. The girls are sympathetic in some instances and not in others...there are times in the story when you think they are getting what they deserve for the way they behaved...but in the end, you want them to pull out of it and save themselves from Mr. Wood. At the very end, just when you think it's all going to be ok, boo...an abrupt shock at the end and the story is over, leaving the reader wondering how the girls will get out of their predicament...this one reeks of sequel, which I understand there are several of. I give it five stars, this is much better written than some of the other books I've read in the series and for taking something that's already kind of creepy (the dummy) and making it horrific several times over. show less

[b: Night of the Living Dummy|125564|Night of the Living Dummy (Goosebumps, #7)|R.L. Stine|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328867793s/125564.jpg|3138654] introduces what is arguably [a: R.L. Stine|13730|R.L. Stine|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1194380070p2/13730.jpg]'s best known monster. Essentially Child's Play for kids, it's nonetheless surprising how purely malevolent and creepy a ventriloquist dummy coming to life can be. The effectiveness of this book largely stems from its emphasis on cruelty rather than violence or gore for its scares. The terror isn't so much in the dummy coming to life as it is int eh way that it occasionally exerts its control over the kids who are using it... and the times that it seems to, but show more isn't, and kids are merely being kids. show less

Kind of a scary book for children so I dont know how many would actually get into this, but I thought it was a cool story and I was actually very interested. RL STine has a unique way of grabbing attention through his writing.

Yes. It's totally the dummy's fault. That's fairly obvious given that this IS Goosebumps, but the story manages to remain interesting, with quite an ending that would cement the Dummy as one of the signature villians of the Goosebumps series.