Goosebumps #8: The Girl Who Cried Monster

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Luc y is the type of girl that Stine loves: cute and sweet, but loves scary stuff and has a dark side. She loves teasing her little brother, making up stories about monsters sneaking around. When the book opens, she’s telling him a story about toe bitters, monsters that eat your toes. He gets all freaked out and her mom yells at her for tormenting him again.

Luckily her best friend Aaron shows up and she convinces him that there’s a monster in the tree. He doesn’t believe her, but she gets so freaked out that it rubs off on him. She tells him that she’s going to sneak up and try to scare it. She knocks something out of the tree and Aaron freaks out, until he realizes that it’s just a bird’s nest.

It’s summer and she’s in a reading program at the local library. The library is in an old, scary house and she has to go once a week and meet Mr. Mortman, the librarian. He assigns her a book, she has a week to read it and then she has to answer a question on it. He gives her the next book and when she leaves, she accidentally forgets her skates. She sneaks back in to get them and finds the librarian turning into a monster and eating bugs.

Of course when she tries to tell people about it, they don’t believe her because of all her lies. She sneaks in again and sees the same thing. This time she decides that she has to get Aaron to see it because he never lies and if he sees it, everyone will believe them. He promises to go and then blows her off. Mr. Mortman keeps sneaking around, acting like he knows something without really saying anything.

Lucy and Aaron finally go to his house and she peeks through the window at him. She sees him change again and runs to get Aaron, but he ran off and hid. Mr. Mortman catches her and seems to believe her story about stopping by to ask him a question. Aaron reveals that he ran off, not wanting them both to get in trouble and he didn’t see anything.

This time she decides to sneak into the library and get a picture of him changing into a monster. She hides in the library and gets a picture, but he sees her and chases her around. She finally gets away and convinces her parents to take the photos to a one-hour lab. Sadly the photos show nothing. She convinces Aaron to sneak into the library with her again and this time he sees it.

They run back to her parents, who naturally believe her now and decide to invite Mr. Mortman over for dinner. He comes, but he acts really suspicious. Finally her parents announce that the librarian is for dinner, turn into monsters and swallow him whole. Lucy reveals that she and her brother haven’t yet gotten their monster teeth yet and her parents explain that it was the first monster in town for over 20 years.

*What the hell? This was an insane little book! Apparently her parents loved the town so much that they didn’t want to share it with any other monsters, hence the not believing her.

*I love that her parents didn’t believe her, but naturally believed Aaron right off the bat. Kind of seems like they should have paid attention or something.

*I don’t think Stine ever read Frankenstein because he has Lucy (12) reading it and talking about the monster the whole time. I think they both watched the movie.

*There’s no way this library program would work in real life. How could any librarian read every book he assigns to a kid and remember it enough to quiz them on it later?

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 12, 2011 at 2:31 PM

    i remember this one. I thought the ending was kinda scary when she finds out her parents are monsters. Talk about a switch.

    *p.s. from what i've heard the book was supposed to be much scarier where the librarian monster actually eats a kid instead of a jar of flies, but the editors switched it thinking it would be too gory.

    thanks for the post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fear StreetJanuary 14, 2011 at 8:46 AM

    "There’s no way this library program would work in real life. How could any librarian read every book he assigns to a kid and remember it enough to quiz them on it later?"

    In this episode of the Goosebumps TV series, it seemed like Lucy was the only kid involved in the program. No-one but her ever shows up at the library...which is understandable considering how shifty and weird Mortman is. Oh, and the fact that he's a monster.

    ReplyDelete

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