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Benjamin Stahl's Reviews > Go Eat Worms!
Go Eat Worms! (Goosebumps, #21)
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Good old Goosebumps. They were an obsession of mine back in primary school. And the funny thing is, I never actually read them. Whenever our library sessions came around, I always grabbed this awesome 'Jurassic Park' visual companion, and usually one of the many Goosebumps books - whichever one's picture most appealed to me on that day.
Sometimes I read one or two chapters ... but I never got any further than that. They didn't scare me, as such, I was just such a lousy reader back then.
To be honest, I really shouldn't be reviewing this one, because it was so many years ago now, and frankly I was just curious to see if these books were even on Goodreads at all.
Anyway, it's been crossing my mind lately that I would like to go back and read every single one of the old-school Goosebumps books; I could finish each one in a day, if I had the time.
But where on earth would I find them? E-bay?
Probably, but in my present situation, ordering a shitload of books probably isn't a good idea. I'll wait till I go back home, and then maybe I'll think about it. But for now, I'll just settle for recounting - very briefly - on the one book I did manage to finish back then.
Even as a child, I had one personal criticism for these books in that they were always structured the same way. Something scary would happen ("scary" in the childish sense, and I was watching such terrors as 'Pet Sematary' and 'Salem's Lot' as far back as I can remember), but this scary happening always turns out to be just a mean trick. Then the story would unravel further, and the tricksters would become the sufferers, falling victim to irony in its most simple of forms.
Obviously I didn't know what "irony" was back then. But any kid knows the the function of such fables like 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' - whether or not that "function" has a name yet.
And I was always aware that R.L. Stine relied primarily on this function to tell his stories.
I didn't buy this; I found it annoyingly predictable. And for the most part, 'Go Eat Worms' was exactly the same.
Except there must have been something else in this one, because unbelievably, I actually did finish it. I really couldn't recount the story now, but one thing I still vividly remember was a conversation I had with my mum on the way home from school, the same day that I finished the book.
She was always encouraging us to read more - just put those bloody controllers down and go read something useful!!! - and I remember actually having this weird feeling in the pit of my stomach ... my very first taste of what I now know was fear.
Not the fear you get from watching movies, or being bellowed at by the headmaster - I had already experienced the former many times; the latter, thankfully never - but the deeper, crawling sensation of fear that clouds over your head like an internal storm cloud. The fear that only a book can give you.
I seriously can't remember what had scared me - I was very young, you understand, so it would still have been fairly mild - but something in this book kinda had scared me nonetheless.
I told my mother about how strange it was that a book, of all things, had actually frightened me. She smiled and agreed, and for whatever reason, I never read again for another few years.
And until this very day, I've never completed another Goosebumps book.
Sometimes I read one or two chapters ... but I never got any further than that. They didn't scare me, as such, I was just such a lousy reader back then.
To be honest, I really shouldn't be reviewing this one, because it was so many years ago now, and frankly I was just curious to see if these books were even on Goodreads at all.
Anyway, it's been crossing my mind lately that I would like to go back and read every single one of the old-school Goosebumps books; I could finish each one in a day, if I had the time.
But where on earth would I find them? E-bay?
Probably, but in my present situation, ordering a shitload of books probably isn't a good idea. I'll wait till I go back home, and then maybe I'll think about it. But for now, I'll just settle for recounting - very briefly - on the one book I did manage to finish back then.
Even as a child, I had one personal criticism for these books in that they were always structured the same way. Something scary would happen ("scary" in the childish sense, and I was watching such terrors as 'Pet Sematary' and 'Salem's Lot' as far back as I can remember), but this scary happening always turns out to be just a mean trick. Then the story would unravel further, and the tricksters would become the sufferers, falling victim to irony in its most simple of forms.
Obviously I didn't know what "irony" was back then. But any kid knows the the function of such fables like 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' - whether or not that "function" has a name yet.
And I was always aware that R.L. Stine relied primarily on this function to tell his stories.
I didn't buy this; I found it annoyingly predictable. And for the most part, 'Go Eat Worms' was exactly the same.
Except there must have been something else in this one, because unbelievably, I actually did finish it. I really couldn't recount the story now, but one thing I still vividly remember was a conversation I had with my mum on the way home from school, the same day that I finished the book.
She was always encouraging us to read more - just put those bloody controllers down and go read something useful!!! - and I remember actually having this weird feeling in the pit of my stomach ... my very first taste of what I now know was fear.
Not the fear you get from watching movies, or being bellowed at by the headmaster - I had already experienced the former many times; the latter, thankfully never - but the deeper, crawling sensation of fear that clouds over your head like an internal storm cloud. The fear that only a book can give you.
I seriously can't remember what had scared me - I was very young, you understand, so it would still have been fairly mild - but something in this book kinda had scared me nonetheless.
I told my mother about how strange it was that a book, of all things, had actually frightened me. She smiled and agreed, and for whatever reason, I never read again for another few years.
And until this very day, I've never completed another Goosebumps book.
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Finished Reading
November 25, 2013
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message 1:
by
Alissa
(new)
Nov 25, 2013 09:04PM
Hey Benjamin, I actually used to have the whole collection of these but somewhere between being "to old" to read them and realizing I wanted to keep them, ended up getting rid of them, remember reading most of them though even if I don't remember the plot so good. There was something that kept me coming back to them, like you said, some thing scared me about it, never really figure out what, one that really stayed with me was Say Cheese and Die, something like that anyway, still remember that one.
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I always loved the picture 'Say Cheese And Die'. I'm exactly the same actually, I got the entire collection one Christmas and they spent about five years rotting away in the garage before I gave them to church or something. There was something indefinably scary about some of them. Don't know if you ever saw the television show? The did an awesome version of 'Haunted Mask' and that one about the tower of London. But I'll always remember refusing to go to bed one night after watching 'Piano Lessons Can Be Murder'. That was terrifying.
Definitely creepy, think mine went to a church to but not sure now. Indefinably scarys a good way to put it, couldn't quite figure out what it was, kept me coming back though. A while back, saw R,L. Stine in the adult section, guess he decided to write to a new age group, haven't got it yet though, my expectations would probably be a little too high. Actually saw the show a couple times, the beginning was creepy, the only one I remember had something to do with water and mabey a shark. Piano lessons can be murder sounds familiar through.
