Goosebumps #043 “The Beast From The East” – Or the book that really did traumatize me.

Sweeney: The tagline for this blog is “The books that ruined us for life.” As much fun as I’m having picking on the BSC girls, I’m learning that all they really did was make me a little naive about the way the world actually works.

This book is a different story. This book actually ruined me. This book is a critical work in the archives of my Childhood Trauma.

Nugs: I’d just like to point out that “The Beast From The East” is a nickname that I gave an ex-boyfriend in high school.

Sweeney: There are so many inappropriate places to go with this, that I’m too overwhelmed to choose one.

My fifth grade teacher required us to do book reports from a variety of different genres. I remember finding it all a little silly because I read more than the other kids, as evidenced by the fact that I had already read the books that we read as a class that year. When I got to the science fiction book, I was admittedly out of my element. We happened to have a few Goosebumps books lying around our house, though.

I was also a super nerdy kid who wrote my name on the inside of all of my books because they were prized possessions and obviously it made sense to me that other people would try to steal them or something. I don’t even know. This is the inside cover of my book:

So that’s what I thought about this assignment.

Lor: This makes me so, so happy. Mostly because I wrote my name in ALL of my books. I even had these super sprarkly stickers that said, “This Book Belongs To __________________” and it had flowers and butterflies and other embarrassing things on it. In fact, the number of stickers on the front cover usually was a measure of how much I liked a book.

/embarrassing. /nerd.

Nugs: I TOTALLY did that too. Except I was super hostile and wrote stuff like, KEEP OUT! I thought I was SO bad ass. I was not.

Sweeney: I totally had stickers like that. And only the books that got my home made book covers had messages written on the outside. Yes. Book covers. Made out of printer paper. For my shitty $2 paper back books.

Anyway, I have been putting this one off for about two weeks now, because even though I only read this book once, at the age of ten, this shit gave me nightmares for years. It still gives me the creeps just thinking about it. I’m not sure if I’m more worried that it’ll haunt me as much as I remember or that I will read it and think it’s ridiculous and that I’m an idiot for being horrified by a children’s book for all these years.

After all, the moral to nearly all of these stories seems to be: “kids are dumb, yo”

The book begins with a family camping trip. I may have exploited the terror this book instilled in my heart as a reason to never go out into the woods. Sleeping outside? Fuck that.

Nugs: Please. I don’t get hostile until I have to be in one. No fucking thank you. Lor: Indoor sleepers say, “haaaiii!”

Sweeney: For real. We evolved and built houses and beds and shit for a reason. We lived about half as long when we were still sleeping on the ground outside like assholes.

So our narrator Ginger is twelve and she has twin ten-year-old brothers, Pat and Nat. I can’t hear the name Pat without thinking of the old SNL skit.

(I’m really sad, by the way, that neither of you had anything to say about our friend Pat. Am I the only one who knows this sketch? Or is this some sort of act of solidarity for people with this stupid name?)

Aside from the dad making foreshadowing jokes about Ginger losing her brothers, these parents seem surprisingly non-negligent for Goosebumps parents. Aside from this whole making their kids sleep out in the fucking woods thing. Camping = negligence.

This one is told retrospectively, by the way. Are the others like this?

Nugs: Mine was. It was also narrated in the style of “second grade writing skillz.”

Lor: Is it bad that I don’t remember? And, I mean, I could go look for it and see but after the last page where it was all, “and my parents turned the cat into a kid,” I chucked that book across the room with a supernatural strength and it hasn’t been seen or heard from again.

Sweeney: Lor, that’s probably for the best.

I don’t remember things working out well for Ginger & co. The fact that she’s narrating this as an event of the past means my memory is wrong. Or that there is a gaping flaw in the structure of this story.

Equally plausible options.

The kids wander off for a bit and play hide-and-go-seek and there’s the usual hitting, spitting on their sister (did you not have brothers?), and cheating that one would expect. Then they decide to go back and Pat gets a little anxious because (s)he’s the only one sensible enough to know that the woods are scary, and they are in a damned Goosebumps book.

Before long Ginger has to admit that she’s lost because the woods suddenly become supremely weird and the sap is weird colors and staining their skin and shit’s crazy.

By page 15 we meet the first scary beast of the book. Didn’t Lor’s dog book put up a more extended pretense of being normal? 15 pages in we have three kids lost in some mutant woods with a furry blue beast with giant fangs that’s like three or four times their size staring them down.

Lor: Dude. My book was 98 pages of “building up the story,” one sentence of, “’cause you are a dog!” and then a page of, “and all the dogs lived happily ever after.”

How come I always get stuck with the boring books?

Sweeney: The back of this book has an advertisement for “Say Cheese And Die…Again” You should try that one.

So there are a series of short chapters where they sit in hiding watching this beast come and go and Ginger’s basically trying to keep her brothers calm and hidden while she tries not to wet herself and while her brothers theoretically would earn a “kids are dumb, yo” mark for believing her nonsense, they are scared little kids who probably want to believe whatever their sister has to say. And I already like this Ginger kid a million times more than any of those BSC girls (and obviously the SVH girls are possibly the most punch-in-the-vag worthy girls in all of fiction).

Just as Ginger is about to execute her risky but reasonable get away plan, a bunch of the beasts come thundering into the clearing. They have a little beast meeting that consists of a lot of grunting noises and then they break and Ginger deduces with the utmost certainty that they are now being hunted. Self-centered much? These beasts can’t be very good hunters, considering that you haven’t moved in forever and observed their entire gathering.

Nugs: Note: If you’re ever in “a clearing” and hear weird grunting sounds behind the bushes, it’s probably not a monster. Just sayin’, Ginger. This girl’s gonna die a virgin.

Sweeney: Ginger is convinced that her parents will come and find them and the fact that this obviously won’t be the case is Parental Negligence / Child Abuse point 1 for this Goosebumps book.

She insists that they need to stay exactly where they are, which sounds like a questionable plan, but now that there are over a dozen enormous beasts combing the woods looking for you, sticking with what appears to be a well-concealed stakeout spot seems like an acceptable strategy. But her little brothers are, as all kids in all books seem to be, dumb. Pat, formerly sensible in his/her woods loathing, has now decided that the twins are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. They insist on going to look for the parents and Ginger’s all, “Well, fuck, I guess I have to go with you because you’re little and dumb and helpless.” (Fine, so maybe I’m paraphrasing here.)

Anyway, as they start the search, a squirrel makes a noise in a bush and Pat takes off running. Ginger trips. Nat stays to help her up. By the time he helps her up, Pat is long gone and the two of them are surrounded by a gaggle of the beasts.

One of them raises an arm to hit her.

“YOU’RE IT.”

Yes, that’s right, the book that traumatized me is about playing hide-and-go-seek with big scary fanged monsters. I feel your judgey eyes on me.

Lor: No, wait.
Wait.
Wait.
ARE YOU FREAKIN’ KIDDING ME?
TAG?!

Sweeney: SHUT UP. IT’S SCARY, DAMN IT.

It takes several more pages of explanation before Ginger realizes that this it’s what’s going on. Names are exchanged and a “Universal Language Adapter” is introduced to explain away the switch from grunting noises to English. (I vaguely remember including in my report that I thought that this was silly. The ability to pull bullshit like this was the reason I would give for why I stayed away from science fiction or fantasy novels in subsequent years. The truth is now out: monsters are fucking scary.)

Nugs: If “names are exchanged,” how come Ginger is still stuck with “Ginger?” That’s unfortunate.

Sweeney: This is probably the most unfortunate thing to happen to poor Ginger in this whole book.

The rules of the game are that if you are IT when the sun goes down, you become monster dinner. Which I guess means that the monsters are cannibals, unless they get a lot of dumb lost humans rolling through their woods. This part is unclear.

After the monsters peace out to go “hide” from these kids, Ginger decides that they should make a run for it, but they’re running for about eight seconds when the get tangled up in a bunch of vines. Which turn out to have eyes. Because they’re snakes.

SERIOUSLY, THESE KIDS DON’T GO MORE THAN LIKE FIVE PAGES WITHOUT SOME NEW FUCKING MONSTER, ONE OF THEM IS MISSING, and honestly, they aren’t even being all that dumb (except for the one who is missing). THIS IS JUST PLAIN UNWINNABLE. AND MISERABLE.

One of the beasts with the weird grunty names comes along and reveals to the kids that they’ve just scored 20 points for being caught up in the snakes? And that if they get bitten they’d score more points? I don’t understand. Grunty McBeasterson gets the snakes off of them and runs away mocking Ginger for not thinking to tag him.

This, apparently, is the first time that Nat realizes that the game is basically tag. Fine: kids are dumb, yo.

But now that Nat understands what’s going on, he’s all, “Listen, Ginger, we can run all damn day and we’ll still be fucking lost and then you’ll lose and get eaten and I’ll probably lose and get eaten tomorrow. So let’s just get smart and trick the beasts so we can tag them and win. How about that?”

(Obviously they should have let me write the actual dialogue here)

Nugs: I fully agree. You are my most favorite person of all time.

Sweeney: So Nat decides to climb a tree so he can see where they’re hiding out. But after he gets to the top, Ginger sees that the tree is alive.

Have you ever seen Jumanji? It was one of my favorite movies but it gave me nightmares. I watched this movie a millionty times but it scared the crap out of me every single time so sometimes I had to fast forward through certain parts.

That’s how I feel about this book. Seriously, I can’t keep telling you all the shit that tries to kill them because we’re not even half-way through this book.

Lor: I thought maybe I was the only person who was utterly freaked out by this movie. I mean, just look at Robin Williams. WHATTHEFUCK is that, “I’m gonna eat you and probably get little pieces of your flesh in my scraggly forest beard,” face?

Also, so far, Sweeney and I don’t sleep outside, write our names in books and are freaked out by Jumanji. I’m pretty sure we should get married now.

Nugs: I’ll fight you, Lor. Only I’m small and frail, so maybe not.

Sweeney: Sister wives, guys.

As the book progresses, Ginger becomes increasingly useless and woe-is-me-I’m-totally-going-to-die and I find it kind of annoying but as much as I enjoy snarking on helpless fictional children, bitch has a point.

Nat, however, turns out to be surprisingly resourceful and, if nothing else, he remains pretty determined in the face of their impending doom proving that the fact that kids are stupid can sometimes be useful. He also seems to forget about his missing twin brother for most of the book.

Nat touches a rock that explodes and then some other nonsensical rule gets him locked in a cage, making poor stupid Ginger totally SOL.

It continues with page after page of falling in caves and “Free Lunch Squares” wherein players are allowed to be eaten for no apparent reason and other nonsense. She has a few successive strokes of luck, though, when she manages to trick the dumbest beast into getting tagged and then runs into Pat.

Oh, and some weird dog-like creature helps them out by showing them The Hiding Cave. But it’s filled with bugs and Ginger’s a damn fool and refuses to stay in there. Because ew, bugs. I hate bugs as much as anybody, but somehow I suspect that the fear of being eaten would trump that.

Just as she thinks the game is over, she gets tagged again because the game hasn’t been called. Nat is brought back out.

“Quiet!” Fleg demanded. “Dinner – stop talking!”

(That quote doesn’t really have a purpose for being there. I just thought it was funny, because I’m a child.)

BUT WAIT. THEY’RE TWINS!

Part of the bullshit that is this game is that there are a panoply of impossible to follow rules. This, as I pointed out earlier, would be my general assumption of books involving mythical creatures for several years.

As it turns out, players who can clone themselves are level 3! They’ve been in a level 1 game! They are set free and pointed in the direction of the path back to their world.

And then some mother fucking Level 3 beast comes out from a bush and tags them.

And that’s the end.

Normally, this blog is a lot of nonsense about how we look back and judge our childhood selves for being so stupid. But I can’t. I will stand by ten-year-old me. This book is fucking terrifying and in no way suitable little kids. In addition to the beasts waiting to eat them throughout the story, each of the 2-4 page chapters introduces some new thing in this weird ass forest that is designed to try and kill them.

Fuck you, R. L. Stine (and Pedobear Ghostwriters).