No Trick-or-treating (Creepover) vs. Attack of the Jack-o’-Lanterns (Goosebumps)

In the 2012 book (HOLY SMOKES! Up til now, this blog had no idea that the new millennium has even started) from the Creepover series (it’s a play on sleepover, get it??), No Trick-or-Treating, Ashley McDowell has just moved to a very small town from Atlanta, right before Halloween. She is not happy about it. Honestly, don’t blame her. This place sounds like it really sucks. Bad vibes. Passive aggressive communication. Insularity. No pizza. Seems like a real drag. Good news for Ashley, though, she meets a few nice gals at school and almost immediately develops a crush on an OMG reaaaally cute boy (though he is bringing big cursed energy, so I’m a lil worried about her romantic prospects with this dude). She tells her new gal pals plus guy that she can’t wait to go trick-or-treating. The book is called No Trick-or-Treating, so you may guess how this goes over. Very badly. Our girl experiences unusually direct communication in this otherwise passive-aggressive small town that she shan’t go trick-or-treating from: her crush, her friends, the parents of her friends, and even the lady who runs the corner market. You might be thinking—Surely, with such consistent messaging (and an understandable preoccupation with trying to blend in, given that she is the new girl and all), she thinks, “Hmmmm, maybe this isn’t the year for me to go trick-or-treating. Maybe my friends and I will just stay in and eat some pizza” (the dad has to drive a full hour to pick up the pizza, so I do really encourage Ashley to savor the za). But no. Ashley goes all out decorating the barn for Halloween and hosts a sleepover so that all of her friends can go trick-or-treating without asking their parents. They dress up in their spookiest costumes (ghost bride, vampire, skeleton, something else), and it is certainly frightening. Honestly, the trick-or-treating scene is pretty darn creepy. They keep running into these menacing children in hyper-realistic costumes that do all kinds of wild shit (run around them in circles with creepy lanterns, carry a super scary jack-o’-lantern emanating an odorous yellow fog; heck one kid smells so bad that it inspires our protagonist to tell a pretty gory story about the time her family had a decaying dead mouse in their wall—It’s all quite grim). Another odd thing is that no one answers their door but everyone leaves a bowl of candy out on their porch (very Chekhov’s candy dish). Anyway, they have a frightening romp around the school and become so scared that they head back to Ashley’s house for classic slumber party antics (hide-and-seek; stiff as a board, light as a feather; scary movies, etc.). The whole thing is really quite nostalgic. A barn is a good (but quite obviously very unsafe) setting for nighttime hide and seek (I really hope this isn’t an anti-vax town and our girls are up-to-date on their tetanus shots). In earnest, I remember being a new girl in school and that feeling of immense relief when you feel like part of a group at a slumber party, and I think the book captured all of that nicely, all while maintaining the right amount of creepy ambience. Alas, our hero’s experience of social inclusion is short-lived, as weird things start happening to her party guests (not so subtly, they begin turning into their costumes—There is a particularly unnerving scene with the neo-Vampire) before they disappear from the party. SPOILER: Note, at this point, it is not, to my discerning eye, at all unclear that on Halloween everyone is turning into their costumes (perhaps, the only mystery to me is why our plucky protagonist is still a real girl). Fortunately, the very adamantly anti-trick-or-treating shopkeeper reveals all. Gotta be honest, I was kind of at the edge of my seat at this point. Our purveyor of goods to the townspeople takes our gal and her crush to a back room where she reveals the names of all of the children that have been transformed into their costumes because of some sort of convoluted revenge curse related to class warfare and Halloween costumes during an economic recession. My one critique is that this information was conveyed in the laziest way possible. Our weary shopkeeper simply does not have the energy to regale our gal and guy with the tragic tale, so she hands her an old letter that reveals all. (The other key piece of info we get is that the curse only applies to those born in the town, so our leading lady is spared; note: the love interest is also not cursed because he resisted the siren song of trick-or-treating; I think this was an effective red herring). Apparently, the shopkeeper had used this letter before. I get it, kids don’t listen, but if you are as weary and haunted as this old gal is (and so motivated for your town to openly communicate about the curse), I don’t know why you wouldn’t share the letter before the kids went trick-or-treating, when it could plausibly have had an impact. Oh well! Ultra Spoiler: I was, at this point, expecting the curse to get magically broken somehow, to spare our precious Ashley the same fate as this withering shopkeeper. But nope. The epilogue shows Ashley as a geriatric shopkeeper, condemned to the same fate of sorrow and regret as her predecessor. Cold (but I was satisfied by the grim surprise ending)!

Overall, I liked this book quite a bit. It was genuinely creepy and well-paced. I also really appreciated some of the subtext around the importance of having explicit conversations about hard things. The town’s relationship to the curse got a bit convoluted. On one hand, most of the residents of this cursed tiny town had supposedly forgotten about the curse, but on the other hand, they lay out candy for the cursed kiddos every year so that the cursed kiddos don’t burn their houses down (yes, that’s a real concern). Regardless, I think that’s a good message- You should absolutely be open with your children about living in a cursed town. Lastly, this “Creepover” book is supposedly written by an author named P.J. Night, and I could find no information about supposed ghostwriters (again, I’m seeking a pre-teen PI to take on this case). Either this is an incredible example of nominative determinism or our author is not using their legal name (or they are so invested in the Creepover universe that they legally changed their name to better align their name with their passions). I’m not sure which option I prefer: Publishers not giving credit to ghostwriters, someone’s parents really setting them up for a very particular career, or obsessive authorship of a spooky book series written for 8-12 year old kids.

The other tale we shall bring to battle this week is Attack of the Jack-O’-Lanterns (a Goosebumps book published in 1996). AotJoL tells the touching tale of an apparently elfish-looking girl named Drew who is constantly teased and pranked by sibling duo Tabby and Lee. Honestly, these pranking siblings go hard, at one point staging a robbery at their Halloween party (as one podcast host noted, the robbery had “big gun energy” though there was no explicit mention of firearms). I worried that Drew is out of her depth when her initial revenge plot is to scare the sibling with jack o’lanterns (a plan that does not seem on par with a staged hostage situation). After a failed attempt to frighten the siblings at their Halloween party the following year, we find ourselves two years into our protagonist’s revenge plot. Ultimately, Drew and her BFF Walker (who costumes as a dark and stormy night- basically he dresses in all black and sprays people with a Super Soaker, very cool) team up with a couple of other friends (Shane and Shana) to terrify the siblings during trick-or-treating with some currently unspecified plot. BUT OH NO! Drew’s parents threaten to not let her go trick-or-treating this year because people in town have been disappearing! (Surely, Mom and Dad have to know how important these just desserts are!). Eventually the parents acquiesce and the still mysterious plan unfolds. (Spoiler) We discover that  Shane and Shana are extraterrestrials and are so committed to this revenge plot that they are willing to risk revealing their alien identities and use their super alien powers (have we mentioned that this revenge plot has been percolating for two agonizing years!?) The aliens and some of their alien buddies morph into pumpkin head monsters and force the meany siblings to trick or treat for hours. How do you force someone to trick or treat for hours, you ask? By removing your pumpkin head and encircling them with some sort of flame wall every time they try to stop (very spooky stuff!). Ultimately, a couple of the pumpkinhead monsters shove pumpkins onto the mean siblings’ heads and the siblings go running off into the night! Phew, so glad that Drew and Dark and Stormy Night got the last laugh, right? Not so fast! We end with the shocking revelation that the extraterrestrials eat humans for food. At least our heroes are safe…for now…

Despite being one of the shortest Goosebumps books, this book drags on, really capturing the characters sense of trick or treating…forever (an iconic refrain from the tv episode that repeatedly played in my mind throughout the reread). Perhaps Stine is a master of form here, giving the reader an immersive experience.

I don’t know much about R. L. Stine’s life (even though I have read his autobiography, It Came from Ohio), but I sometimes wonder if his life’s work has been propelled by some sort of Halloween-based vendetta. This is not his only book about seeking revenge. Headless Halloween, Halloween Night (1 and 2!), and the Haunted Mask are all oriented around some sort of revenge plot.

As noted above, I feel an immense pressure when choosing which books to battle during the Halloween season. I’m fairly sure my mom is the only reader of this blog, and I could not bear for her to be disappointed in my selections at such a crucial time of year (JK, thanks, mom, for being such a loyal reader <3). I chose to pair AotJoL with No Trick-or-Treating, because I knew that both books were very trick-or-treating forward and explicitly featured parental figures telling their kids to not go trick-or-treating. I had been desperate for a pairing with No Trick-or-Treating that was also Halloween slumber party forward, but I was alas unable to find a book that checked all of these boxes. That said, I think this was a really good match. Unbeknownst to me, both books specifically featured parents not wanting their children to go trick or treating out of concern that their kids wouldn’t return (in one case, that their children would be turned into monsters and in the other case that their children would be abducted, though the parents did not realize that extraterrestrials would be the root of that issue). Both books featured creepy trick-or-treating scenes, though the pacing was much more engaging in No Trick-or-Treating (that said AotJoL did an excellent job of allowing the reader to experience a truly monotonous trick-or-treating slog). I suspect that the Creepover series (and this book in particular) was deeply inspired by Goosebumps, as the books seemed to heavily share tropes and structure. Both books had a potpourri of jump scares/fakeouts (including the very specific, oh no, that creature’s head just fell off and oh no, I am tricking treating and surrounded by a glowing lantern/flame wall wielded by a deranged trick-or-treater), though I think the pranks generally worked better in the Creepover book (despite pranks being Goosebumps’ signature thing). Goosebumps is also notorious for having a big reveal and then a last minute twist (in the Goosebumps book, the reveal was that the friends were aliens and the twist was that the friends will probably eat them someday; in the Creepover book, the reveal was that the book was set in a cursed Halloween town and the twist was that our main gal does not get the happy ending typical of these kinds of stories and is doomed to live out the curse). Lastly, I guess Halloween-based revenge plots are not merely a Stine thing, as both books leveraged Trick-or-Treating as the vehicle through which to enact revenge upon one’s enemies.

Showdown Winner: No Trick-or-Treating (Creepover) by P. J. Night. Ultimately, I think Creepover (at least this book) may have elevated the art form that is the boiler plate Goosebumps book. Maybe there is hope and intrigue post-Y2K after all!