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A review by corncobwebs
The 12 Screams of Christmas by R.L. Stine
Kate Welles is dying to get a part in her middle school's Christmas play. She doesn't get the main role due to a knock-down-drag-out fight with her frenemy Courtney, but still gets to participate as part of the chorus. Since the play is a Christmas ghost story, the drama teacher takes the cast on an overnight trip to an old haunted house so they can get in the right frame of mind for the play. But this is about the worst thing that could happen to Kate -- she has the unfortunate ability to see ghosts. She starts seeing and interacting with the ghosts of the family that lived in the house years ago. They're agitated and angry because the youngest member of the family, Flora, died when she fell into the well in the backyard. As real as this scenario is to Kate, her classmates can't see or hear anything unusual and think Kate is bonkers. Her visions and experiences keep intensifying, including the ghost of Flora trying to lure her into the well (which totally reminded me of [b:Wait Till Helen Comes|267972|Wait Till Helen Comes|Mary Downing Hahn|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348192669s/267972.jpg|259783]), presumably to take her place so she can rejoin her family. There's also a pretty good scene where Kate is trapped in the attic with the ghost family, and they force her to participate in all kinds of macabre versions of Christmas traditions. My favorite was "sitting on Father Christmas' lap," which entailed dragging out a worm-infested skeleton dressed in a Santa suit, on whose knee the children were expected to perch while enumerating their Christmas wishes. Psycho, anyone? Anyway. The big climax happens when Kate convinces the ghost family to set her free if she can rescue Flora from the well. She's able to lure Flora up by screaming "Come back!" 12 times (that's a pretty freaking flimsy solution to the problem, if you ask me), then is able to pull her out of the well with Courtney's help. Courtney was the ringleader in terms of teasing Kate about her ability to see ghosts, but then Courtney sees Flora in this scene and has to endure the ensuing taunts from her classmates -- so she gets her comeuppance. The ghosts relinquish their hold on Kate, and she makes it home, safe and sound. But in a bizarre final twist, we find out that Flora has followed Kate home, and expects to live happily ever after with the girl who rescued her. This last bit seemed totally tacked on and unnecessary to me.
I remember singing the praises of [b:Welcome to Dead House|125553|Welcome to Dead House (Goosebumps, #1)|R.L. Stine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328867798s/125553.jpg|448935] -- the first-ever Goosebumps book -- when I read it a few months ago. The writing was solid, the story was sufficiently creepy and suspenseful, and I thought it would have a lot of appeal for a variety of readers, but especially reluctant ones. This book? Not so much. Maybe it's because RL Stine has written scores of Goosebumps books since that first one, and in order to churn them out at such a frenetic pace, he has to be kind of formulaic about it. There weren't enough descriptive details to really make the story come alive in my mind, and a lot of the dialogue seemed kind of slap-dash. I liked how the book started with a flashback to the era when the ghost family were living, breathing people, but I thought the sloppier elements that I just mentioned started to emerge when the story flips over to the present day.
Kids will want to read this book, and they'll probably like it, but there are way better ghost stories out there.
I remember singing the praises of [b:Welcome to Dead House|125553|Welcome to Dead House (Goosebumps, #1)|R.L. Stine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328867798s/125553.jpg|448935] -- the first-ever Goosebumps book -- when I read it a few months ago. The writing was solid, the story was sufficiently creepy and suspenseful, and I thought it would have a lot of appeal for a variety of readers, but especially reluctant ones. This book? Not so much. Maybe it's because RL Stine has written scores of Goosebumps books since that first one, and in order to churn them out at such a frenetic pace, he has to be kind of formulaic about it. There weren't enough descriptive details to really make the story come alive in my mind, and a lot of the dialogue seemed kind of slap-dash. I liked how the book started with a flashback to the era when the ghost family were living, breathing people, but I thought the sloppier elements that I just mentioned started to emerge when the story flips over to the present day.
Kids will want to read this book, and they'll probably like it, but there are way better ghost stories out there.