Reader Beware, You're In For a Scare!
Children are more fearless than we give them credit for, and I wish my parents had recognized this before deciding any and all children’s horror media would be banned from our household when I was a kid. Scooby Doo? Banned. Tales from the Crypt? Banned. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? Banned. All of these things were considered “at risk of being too scary” or “in celebration of darkness”. But even at a young age, I struggled to understand my parents' insistence on sheltering me from "fright" or "the dark". I loved the thrill of being scared the way my brother loved the thrill of a rollercoaster. Furthermore, childhood itself can be very dark and scary. Stories where young people my age were facing monsters and overcoming frightening unknowns gave me the power to survive the real world in a way Barney the Dinosaur or the Care Bears never could.
So, being the sneaky little goblin child that I was, I managed to find ways around my parents' regulations. I discovered R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books in 1999 when I was perusing the shelves at my local library. Admiring their vibrant and sinister covers, I knew these would never be books I could check out without my mother’s approval, so I speedily read one per week between the stacks. The Goosebumps titles that gave me a particular thrill were the Night of the Living Dummy books, and I was introduced to what is now one of the most recognizable Goosebumps villains in Stine’s entire series—Slappy.
I’ve been enamored by ventriloquist dummies ever since I picked those books up at 8 years old. My grandparents also kept a dummy for decades and I had always gotten a kick out of his cheerful grin and tiny hands. I was amused by the way his eyes might follow me in passing (or was that just my imagination? *wink* ) and how charming he looked in his warm, yellow jacket. But as a young person who'd already been enchanted by puppets in general since the age of 3, I had a particular fascination with how a ventriloquist dummy was given life.
Unlike the delicate marionettes with their strings or the cartoonish muppets with their puppeteer handlers, a talented ventriloquist manipulated their dummy by making it appear as though it could speak all by itself. My dark and whimsical child brain thought: “Well how do I really know it’s NOT speaking all by itself?” And so the Night of the Living Dummy books seized that thought, added a touch of delicious dark magic to it, and entertained my wildest imaginations about the possibilities of inanimate objects coming to life.
The books also kicked off a very bizarre phase of my childhood where I became somewhat of a “dummy fanatic”. Not only did I write lots of short stories about dummies hiding under beds or waiting in dark basements, I even submitted a Night of the Living Dummy inspired story to my English teacher for a class assignment (she was equally impressed and concerned. I got a B+). Unbeknownst to myself, I was becoming a young horror writer and also morphing into a little puppet-loving weirdo. Today, one of my comfort-horror movies is about a man haunted by the ghost of a ventriloquist (Dead Silence), and recently I’ve even inherited my grandparents' dummy (whose name is Lester)! So the creepy puppet love has stuck, which made me all the more excited to revisit my favorite spine-chilling Goosebumps books.
Night of the Living Dummy Revisited
When deciding to reread these books for this Summer Nostalgia Reads series challenge, part of me wanted to recreate the entire childhood experience—sitting cross-legged between the stacks of the children’s fiction section in the library with a book in my lap. But as an adult, that might have been weird. So I settled for reading on my living room couch.
While Lawrence Public Library does have Night of the Living Dummy I, II, and III available in eAudio and eBook format on the Libby app, I decided to blow the dust off the physical copies I bought second-hand years ago, the copies with the beloved and brilliant, original artwork by Tim Jacobus.
"You have to be brave to go up to our attic. Not because of the creaking stairs. Or the way the wind whistles through the attic windows and makes the panes rattle. Not because of the dim light up there. Or the shadows. Or the low ceiling covered with cracks. You have to be brave because of the eyes. The eyes that stare at you through the darkness. The eyes that never blink. The eyes that stare with such eerie, heavy silence."
In each book I occasionally came across passages that, as an adult, felt spooky but, as a kid, were effective enough to creep the socks off of me back in 1999. And I was reintroduced to different child protagonists as they discovered Slappy in some unsavory places — a smelly dumpster, a musty pawn shop, or a dusty attic — and naively welcomed him into their home, where he would eventually cause mischief and wreak havoc. Younger me had wished she'd found something that cool in any one of those places. Adult me, who has consumed millions of scary stories and now knows better, would've sensed the red flags and simply said "NOPE".
When reading these books at 8 years old, I felt my hair stand on end whenever the protagonist heard Slappy's little footsteps in a dark hall, caught him blinking from the corner of their eye, or found him sitting in a spot he'd previously not been placed. I vividly remember making serious mental notes every couple of chapters: (1) Lock any evil dolls in my closet if they ever come to life and threaten to enslave me. (2) Recruit little brother to help with burying evil dolls in the backyard should the occasion arise. (3) Never read any strange, mysterious, magical words aloud unless you want to reanimate dolls and unleash evil. It was that serious, y'all!
But Goosebumps had encouraged my younger self to think valid thoughts, make hypothetical emergency plans, and ask important questions like "what would I have done?", "who would I have confided in?", and "how would I handle this?" These books were truly my safe space to explore fear and confront obstacles.
Goosebumps Lives On
Now at the age of 35, the books are obviously nowhere near as scary as I remember, but I appreciate how they helped me navigate my own scary world and created the horror-loving, spooky librarian I am today. The books I chose to read were published in the early '90s, but R.L. Stine has continued Slappy's story with several more books published as recently as 2023! Younger Christina would be thrilled to learn that her favorite evil puppet is now infiltrating nightmares (Slappy in Dreamland), getting wrapped up in trouble with other monsters (The Dummy Meets the Mummy), and even has an evil twin (I Am Slappy's Evil Twin)! So I am comforted in knowing there is a whole new generation of young readers enjoying these fun and scary stories as much as I did. As an aunt, I'm hoping to pass my own worn and loved copies down to my nieces and nephews. And perhaps R.L. Stine's spooky world of cursed masks, haunted houses, and evil puppets will help them escape the real horrors of our reality for awhile too.
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