Ann M. Martin

Night of the Living Dummy

Sarah Sammis

It took me about an hour. It was the perfect thing to read on a rainy day. :)

Grabbed the audio for a long car ride with my fiancée. This one was one of the scariest episodes in the show and haunted me for years! This one has definitely been read multiple times.

It’s funny reading it now, as I happened to get through Revenge of the Living Dummy and Slappy, Beware! before this one, and I have to say there is clearly a very formulaic way that Stine writes the Slappy stories. At least in the examples giving, it’s one kid get doll, the other gets jealous, another doll gets bought, and then Slappy mayhem ensues. Most of them have little twists and changes that would keep them fresh for kids, but as an adult I clearly caught on.

Regardless, this one was THE beginning for Slappy and it’s obvious why so much was built around him within the world of Goosebumps. Fantastic and classic cliffhanger. Personally will remain a 5/5* for what it achieves and for haunting my dreams for years.

C. J. Daley 

Grabbed the audio for a long car ride with my fiancée. This one was one of the scariest episodes in the show and haunted me for years! This one has definitely been read multiple times.

It’s funny reading it now, as I happened to get through Revenge of the Living Dummy and Slappy, Beware! before this one, and I have to say there is clearly a very formulaic way that Stine writes the Slappy stories. At least in the examples giving, it’s one kid get doll, the other gets jealous, another doll gets bought, and then Slappy mayhem ensues. Most of them have little twists and changes that would keep them fresh for kids, but as an adult I clearly caught on.

Regardless, this one was THE beginning for Slappy and it’s obvious why so much was built around him within the world of Goosebumps. Fantastic and classic cliffhanger. Personally will remain a 5/5* for what it achieves and for haunting my dreams for years.

Maggie Gordon

Cross-posted at: http://mgbookreviews.wordpress.com/20...

Like Monster Blood, Night of the Living Dummy is one of the central, re-occurring Goosebumps stories, but I am not a very big fan of this initial installment (though I am quite fond of the sequels). So what made this one so different? Character development is not a strong point for the Goosebumps series, but I found the main characters in this story were particularly irritating and flat. Night of the Living Dummy stars twins Lindy and Kris who find a dummy in the trash. Lindy decides to keep the dummy, naming him Slappy, and Kris becomes jealous of her ventriloquism skills and the attention that it brings her twin. To stop the two from fighting, the twins’ father buys Kris a second dummy that she names Mr. Wood. However, Mr. Wood isn’t a normal dummy, and he acts out violently, taking control of Kris’ acts. No one will believe her when she claims that the dummy is alive, so the sisters have to team up to defeat this evil marionette.

The idea of a living dummy is nerve-racking, and the Slappy and Mr. Wood characters are scary because they seem to be sociopathic, unkillable monsters. The part of the story involving the dummies doing evil things worked well because it is pretty chilling to think about strange, living dolls wandering around your house at night, destroying things and trying to mess up your life. However, I could have done without Kris. I generally do not have a problem with well-written, unlikeable characters, or young characters that act their age. Kris, on the other hand, just gives me a headache. She’s so intensely jealous of her sister, and I felt that there wasn’t enough pushback against her bad behaviour in the narrative telling her that she should just chill out and figure out her own way to shine. I know that the relationship between twins is unique, but one would think that she wouldn’t want to strive to do the exact same things as her sister. I also felt that her parents should definitely not have encouraged Kris to try and steal the stoplight from Lindy so obviously. However, if they had done that, we wouldn’t have had this story, so the awkward characterisation can be forgiven as it led to a particularly memorable villain.

Night of the Living Dummy

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