Goosebumps Series 2000 #1: Cry of the Cat

Cry of the Cat opens with a girl and boy getting attacked by a cat before it cuts to a girl checking on her little brother. He's screaming because the movie is so scary, but she turns it off and calms him down. Tanner tells Alison to have a "mice" day, and she lets us know that it's an in joke because she has a big collection of mice.

Alison meets up with her best friend Ryan, and the two head back to school for rehearsals of a play they're in together. She sees a cat run out in front of her, and it runs under her bike before she can stop. Ryan wants her to just leave it behind, but she wants to see if it's okay. When she realizes the cat is dead, she sees a house nearby with the door open. A young girl named Crystal opens and flips out, saying that it's Rip and only her mom can help.

Alison is still really upset over what happened but goes to school anyway. While working on stage, she keeps hearing a cat meowing but no one else can hear it. Then, she opens a cabinet door, and the same cat rushes out and attacks her. When she knocks the cat off, some kids moving a heavy throne drop it on the cat, and it dies again. She goes back to Crystal, who mentions that only her mom can help before shutting the door in her face.

This pretty much leads to the cat coming back and terrorizing Alison in multiple ways. She tries to eat a bowl of homemade soup her mom made and finds big clumps of cat fur in the bowl. Rip then attacks her when she's asleep one night and leaves behind big white scratches on her arms that disappear the next day. Crystal still refuses to help, though she does say something about how he used up eight of his nine lives.

Alison then comes home to find her collection of mice in the trash can and on the floor. She lies to her little brother, telling him that she did it herself. While standing on a ladder at another rehearsal, she thinks that she's a cat and tries to jump off the top of the ladder and land on all fours, but she doesn't hurt herself too bad.

This is all kind of lame, so let's just jump ahead. Alison tries to find Rip, Ryan sees her and follows her. They wind up in a pet cemetery, the ground shakes, and a bunch of cats climb out of the graves. They run back to Crystal's house, and the cats follow them. They somehow get separated, and Crystal says that her mom can help before leading her into the basement.

Her mom is actually some random half woman half cat creature that pretends to help before revealing that she really just wants to help Rip. They tell her a long story about how her mom experimented on cats, something went wrong, and Rip turned evil. He kept scratching the mom, which let him steal some of her lifeline. Every time he scratched her, she lost some of her life and turned into a cat.

Rip and the other cats descend on the basement and start to attack. Ryan shows up, and Rip attacks him, scratching up his face. Alison remembers that she still has a toy mouse in her pocket from when she cleaned up her room and she throws it at the cats. They all attack the mice and kill Rip in the process.

Crystal and her mom thank her for breaking the curse and announce that they plan on leaving town. Ryan has no clue what happened, but he's glad Alison is okay. Cut to the two of them leaving a few days later for rehearsal. Ryan sees something in the grass, bounds over, and comes back with a half-dead mouse in his mouth. Alison bitches that she saw it first, so I guess they became cats or something.

*Yeah, so we have cats. Alison says that she threw the mouse because even dead cats are still cats. Most of ours will have nothing to do with toy mice, even those realistic looking ones. They see them, turn up their noses, and walk away.

*The description of the mom is pretty brutal. She has a woman's face with whiskers, and she has one normal arm and one cat arm with a complete tail.

*Cry of the Cat comes back again when her brother tries to watch it again, but he gets too scared and freaks out. Then again, he's only supposed to be five.

*At one point, Alison starts licking her arm like a cat in front of people and can't understand why they keep looking at her funny.

*This is random, but my thrift store copy of the book still has the iron on transfer in the middle. Is it bad that I totally want to put it on a tee shirt?