Goosebumps #017 “Why I’m Afraid of Bees” – Or why I’m afraid of awful books.

Sweeney: “If you’re afraid of bees, I have to warn you – there are a lot of bees in this story. In fact, there are hundreds.”

Thank you for beginning the book in that fashion! I had not guessed that by picking up a book called Why I’m Afraid of Bees with an utterly absurd picture of a bee with the head of a little boy on the cover that I was about to read a book that would prominently feature bees.

Nugs: Yeah, I mean, I totally assumed that this would be about, like, monster trucks or something. Thank you, R. L. Stine, for a life lesson in humility once again.

Sweeney: The BSC books have a soft spot in my heart, but these Goosebumps books are seriously just mind-numbingly stupid.

Our narrator is Gary Lutz and I shall begin my Goosebumps-guide-to-bad-parenting by awarding his parents 10 Shitty Parent Points for giving him this name because the kid was doomed to be friendless.

OH HEY, HE IS FRIENDLESS. He spends his summer days passing out under trees with his comic books because he has no friends and, “Even my nine-year-old sister, Krissy, doesn’t like me very much. My life is the pits.”

Nugs: EXCUSE ME? What’s wrong with comic books? And why does he spend his days passing out? These Goosebumps kids start early. Bad parenting example number two.

Sweeney: I can’t believe I missed that one.

But Gary, maybe if you stopped saying stupid shit like “My life is the pits” you would have friends. Or if you stopped making obvious statements to clarify thoughts that did not need clarification. “I heard a frightening buzz, the buzz of a bee.”

In two pages I can already tell that this kid is not only dumb but boring as hell.

I had typed out this bit where I summarized his emo-whining that made me want to punch him in the jeans but then I realized that this character is so pathetic that you can’t get a whole lot worse than his own words:

“Why is that?” I constantly ask myself. “What exactly is wrong with me? Why do all the kids call me names like Lutz the Klutz? Why does everybody always make fun of me?”

Seriously, I’m still on the second page.

He spends 30 minutes staring at his face in the mirror trying to figure out why he sucks so hard and he keeps hearing this wretched buzzing noise.

It turns out his neighbor Mr. Andretti keeps bees which is just weird, so I can’t fault our moronic and tragically uninteresting narrator for being a creepster and spying on his oddball neighbor.

But it turns out that this has been a problem in the past. So our narrator is stupid, uninteresting, and a future stalker. Mr. Andretti is also a real winner because he flips a shit and yells at a ten-year-old for having the audacity to watch his creepy creepster neighbor doing his beekeeping.

Maybe you should get a less bizarre hobby, friend?

(But I am a little jealous of anyone, fictional or otherwise, who gets to yell at the stupid children in these books.)

“Mr. Andretti knows perfectly well that I’m twelve years old.”

OH. Shut up.

We are reminded a millionty more times that Gary is afraid of bees. He lists the other things he is afraid of, which is basically everything.

Mr. Andretti deliberately scares the crap out of Gary and tells him to get a life and he gets teased by some other kids before getting beat up by yet another group of kids with really stupid names – Barry, Marv, and Karl.

Nugs: In his defense (don’t throat punch me!), those DO sound like names that would be attached to kids that kick the asses of other kids. Just sayin’.

Sweeney: They do, but that doesn’t make Gary any less annoying.

After cleaning himself up he goes to the kitchen where he asked to open a jar of peanut butter. He fails and then his little sister opens it with ease. He is laughed at by both the sister (obviously – I would too) (Nugs: I think everyone would) and his mother. I’ll give her one Shitty Parent Point for being oblivious to the fact that her kid was just beat up and then mocking him. But only one because I really don’t like this kid.

He storms out of the house and hops on his bike. He pedals no-handed to impress two girls he sees and then swerves into a lamppost, damaging his bike, himself, and his pride. The girls laugh at him and walk away.

Fine, Gary, everyone around you is actually an asshole. But you’re an idiot. I think this is the childhood equivalent of reality television. It makes you feel better about your own life because at least you’re not this pathetic.

Gary goes back to his room and gets on his computer game message boards, which made me check the publishing date on this book. 1994. That means that Gary is astoundingly nerdy, but possibly also kind of smart, which is a load of crap because I have watched this kid do one insanely stupid thing after another for the duration of this book.

Anyway, on his message boards he sees an advertisement to trade lives with another person for a week. Rather than asking himself about how such a thing is even logistically or physically possible, his question is: “How could two people change lives without getting into all kinds of trouble?”

Conveniently, the address for this “company” is only a few blocks away. He resolves to go the next day. Later that evening we learn that his little sister is on the long list of things he’s afraid of because she plays a prank on him and he can’t retaliate because she would probably beat him up. This kid is just too pathetic for words.

“Person-to-Person Vacations” is located on Roach Street. What town actually names a street that?

Building 113, Suite 2-B. Har. Har har.

The woman explains that they have some weird body-swapping machine and Gary gets a little scared about the whole thing. Of course, he gets beat up again on his way home which strengthens his resolve to go through with it.

The organization keeps pictures and profiles and such on all the kids and sets everything up like a some sort of body-swapping match.com for children. The levels of STRANGER DANGER and borderline pedophilia are just off the charts. I have no idea what sort of drugs went into the creation of this ridiculous concept.

A good-looking athletic kid named Dirk Davis wants to switch with Gary for a week so that Gary can take his math tests for him. Ms. Karmen from Person-to-Person Vacations comes to Gary’s house to perform the procedure. The ghostwriter could only be bothered to create the necessary contrivance to get the family out of the house — Coming up with a reason for this procedure to be performed at Gary’s home instead of the office would have taken too much effort, obviously.

Mr. Andretti’s bee screen has a big hole in it and in yet another explained bit of nonsense, Gary’s back door is open so bees are flying into the house while the body swapping procedure is being performed.

This is all so lazy it’s ridiculous. How did someone get paid to write this?

Nugs: Let’s all also keep in mind that Justin Bieber made a hundred million dollars last year, and I’m still technically unemployed. I’m going back to sleep.

Sweeney: That’s probably the best decision one can make. You certainly don’t want to read any more about this heinous book.

Gary panics for a couple chapters and tries to get the attention of Ms. Karmen before she leaves and then his parents as they return. He gets super depressed watching everyone talk to Dirk in Gary’s body. After he accepts that nobody is going to hear him because he is a bee, he decides that he has to go to the Person-to-Person office to explain the mix-up to Ms. Karmen. How he intends to communicate with Ms. Karmen as a fucking bee is beyond me.

As he comes up with this brilliant plan, more disastrous shit happens. He gets attacked by his sister’s cat and escapes only to be caught by Mr. Andretti and taken back to his hives.

During all of this we get a lot of gross and uninteresting discussion of bees. Poor kids are being tricked into learning things when they read this book! They will learn absolutely nothing about constructing a story or a plot or anything of that sort, but they’ll get a completely unimportant science lesson…

Gary escapes Mr. Andretti’s garage and goes back to his house. He tries again to communicate with his sister because he’s an idiot. She nearly swats him to death. He then goes to speak to Dirk-as-Gary and goes all Edward Cullen watching him sleep. When Dirk-as-Gary wakes, his communication efforts are again a failure because, you know, he’s a bee.

He then stalks Dirk-as-Gary because Gary is a creepy stalker and being a bee makes it even easier for him to get his stalker on. Dirk-as-Gary is actually kind of cool and the girls who laughed at him are getting skateboarding lessons. Bee Gary follows Dirk-as-Gary and the girls to the playground where everyone is waiting for him to give them skateboarding lessons. Don’t you just kind of get on the skateboard and go? Whatever, not the point.

Bee Gary finally realizes that he’s got to go back to Person-to-Person because Ms. Karmen is the only one who can help him. Blah blah blah contrivance contrivance contrivance Gary gets into the office and at long last it occurs to him that as he has been unable to communicate with anyone, he cannot communicate with Ms. Karmen either.

In this office Karmen sits behind glass and speaks into a microphone. Apparently Bee Gary has actual vocal chords and can make human noises (a bit of a hitch in the cracked out science lesson, no?) but they have just been too quiet for anyone to hear. Bee Gary flies to the microphone and starts talking to Karmen.

Nugs: Clearly, that is a hitch in the science lesson. However, Stine or Ghostwriter seems to have forgotten about the “science” part. Or math, or English, or anything in the academic sense.

Sweeney: Particularly logic. Stine and the Scholastic Ghostwriting Team really missed the boat on that one.

Talking Bee Gary scares the shit out of Karmen because body-switching is legit but talking bees are not. Got it.

Then she’s all, “OH, THAT’S WHY FAKE DIRK HAS BEEN SO WEIRD! LOLZ! But hopefully this has been interesting for you, right?” And Gary’s all “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME YOU CRAZY BITCH?”

No, I’m kidding. Gary’s version of that comment is actually several pages of whining about how hard his life is. I mean, sure, his life is hard, but my version would have made him much more likable.

Anyway, it turns out that Gary has another problem: Dirk totally loves being Gary and is refusing to go back to his old body. Ms. Karmen’s all, “Nothing I can do about it. But I’m super upset that this happened!” And Gary’s all, “OH YOU’RE SUPER UPSET?”

Nugs: Who would love being Gary? But moving on.

Sweeney: That’s going to be part of The Big Lesson, Nugs. Nevermind the fact that this kid is a train wreck…

For some reason Ms. Karmen’s suggestion is for Gary to just go back to the hive and wait for Dirk to maybe change his mind. What about Dirk’s body? Isn’t there a bee chilling in Dirk’s body right now? This woman is a bigger idiot than any of the kids we’ve encountered.

Ms. Karmen goes home for the night to think over Gary’s problem and Gary gets trapped in the office for a hot second before he figures out how to escape because he’s a bee and can fit through tiny spaces and this book makes me want to go over every inch of our walls looking for cracks. Before he leaves he finds Dirk’s paperwork to see if the old Dirk can help him figure out how to get his body back. AND STILL NOBODY HAS CONSIDERED THE POSSIBILITY OF AT LEAST GETTING HIM INTO THIS AVAILABLE HUMAN BODY.

When Gary finds Dirk’s body, the kid is super weird and sticking his nose in flowers and this is the first time that it occurs to Gary that the bee’s brain is now in Dirk’s body. I then beat my head against my desk for a solid five minutes because the stupid in this book is just disturbing.

Nugs: SOLID Fight Club reference. There is always a time and place. Sweeney, if I didn’t love you already, this post would have cemented it. You know we can get married in New York now, right?

Sweeney: Nugs, that was clearly my first thought when I heard the news. I’ll book my flight as soon as we’re done here.

Now Gary is going to somehow force Dirk to relinquish his body. When he finds Dirk-as-Gary again, he watches Dirk-as-Gary threaten and tell off Gary’s former tormentors because Dirk is doing a much better job of being Gary than this little shit ever did. Gary then decides to taunt the trio of goons in bee form, because he feels all empowered now.

Back in Gary’s room, Bee Gary is able to have a conversation with Dirk-as-Gary and I accept that I have to stop questioning the fact that nothing in this book makes any sense. Dirk-as-Gary explains that he’s not giving Gary’s body back because his life is pretty awesome and Gary was an idiot for not being more grateful. Bee Gary mopes off and wallows in self-pity.

For some reason a group of bees basically try to take him prisoner? I don’t really understand why because explanations aren’t really a thing in this book unless we’re explaining something obvious. Gary decides to use this to his advantage and escapes the bees and charges at Dirk-as-Gary with the other bees following him. He decides that he needs more bees so flies back to Mr. Andretti’s and recruits all of those bees.

Dirk-as-Gary is all “I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU DO, I’LL NEVER GIVE UP YOUR BODY.” Bee Gary is so angry he stings Dirk-as-Gary in the nose. Then he’s all, “Aw fuck, doesn’t that kill bees? Right. It does. Shit shit shit.”

He passes out and then comes to in his own body. In keeping with the rest of this book, there is absolutely no explanation as to how or why this caused him to get his body back.

Nugs: Now I’m pissed, because if he would have realized that in the first place, we wouldn’t have had to sit through this whole book.

Sweeney: YUP. If Gary had just stung the little asshole back on page 20, I could have been spared the bruises and such. But then we wouldn’t have gotten to our Big Important Lesson:

Gary is no longer afraid of stuff and he goes on for a couple pages about how awesome he is now and how he has miraculously become athletic after all of this. He runs into Dirk on the playground (who apparently ended up back in his body in this unexplained magical transaction) and they have an exchange which, again, my words can’t do justice to:

He apologized to me. “I’m sorry I tried to steal your body,” he said. “But things didn’t turn out so well for me, either. That bee flunked all my math tests in summer school!”

We both had a good laugh about that and now Dirk and I are friends.

No lie. That’s actually what it says. “SORRY I TRIED TO STEAL YOUR BODY, BUT THAT BEE FLUNKED MY MATH TESTS LOLOLOL.”

The book ends with Gary explaining to us how a human mouth can suck pollen out of a flower and suggesting that we try it sometime because it’s delicious. This is yet another example of creepy innuendo from the Pedophile Ghostwriting Team.

I am super grateful that I read this at work so that I was at least getting paid for the brain cells I certainly lost by reading this shit. Given the Gary’s last few pages discuss how he is no longer afraid of shit, this is actually the story of why he isn’t afraid of bees. “Shh,” says a little voice inside my head, “Let’s not go trying to apply logic to a Goosebumps book.”