As I read, I found myself biting my lip and shouting 'No! Don't!' in my head. But Stine sets it up perfectly so that even if it doesn't surprise you, you can't help but feel your stomach squirm. Of course, with a book titled Night of the Living Dummy you can guess that the dummy is going to come alive. Stine manages to make everyday, ordinary things feel not quite right. Or the cliffhanger at the end.īut reading as an adult and as a writer, I was struck by the more subtle ways Stine teases his audience - the way he describes the sound of a rusty swing-set, or writes of a triangle of lamplight surrounded by darkness. Or when he spews out green gunk all over the school. The moment when the dummy talks for the first time. When I was a kid, it would have been the big shocker moments that got me. Things that could only be explained if one of the dummies was. But her twin sister, Kris, is jealous, so she gets a doll of her own: Mr. Lindy, thanks to her new doll, Slappy, is getting tons of attention for all the tricks she can do.

In Night of the Living Dummy, Lindy discovers a ventriloquist doll in the construction site beside her home. But, I reminded myself, isn't it the point to get scared? A large part of me wanted to put this book down and just read a different one. Even though I'm a grown-up and I know logically that dolls coming to life is preposterous, there's something about them that plunges me into cold abyss of fear. Here's a not-so-secret secret about me: stories in which dolls come to life scare me more than anything. I hadn't really paid attention to the title, Night of the Living Dummy. Stine, $4, AmazonĪbout two paragraphs in, I realized that I made a fatal mistake. What happened next gave me nightmares for days. I turned out the lights and switched the graphics over to night mode, so it was just me and the white words floating eerily in the dark. My original plan was to read it under my covers with a flashlight, true '90s kid style, but then I realized that with the book on my iPad, I didn't even need a flashlight. So, I popped over to my library website and checked out a copy of a Goosebumps classic - Night of the Living Dummy,the seventh book in the original Goosebumps series and the first starring what would become Stine's most infamous villain: Slappy the Dummy. When I heard news of Goosebumps big birthday, I realized it had been decades since I had actually read one of the books. At this point, the author has written over 300 books, and the Goosebumps series has spawned a TV show and a movie starring Jack Black as R.L. Stine is still going strong and still terrifying kids for a living. In 2017, the infamous horror series turns 25 years old, and author R.L. Every '90s kid remembers the prickly feeling of anticipation and fear that preceded any reading of Goosebumps.

Goosebumps dummy book