Goosebumps book 11: The Haunted Mask - If looks could kill...

Brief Summary: 

Everyone is always trying to scare Carly Beth because she scares easily and that's funny. This Halloween, Carly Beth has a creepy mask that will help her get her revenge for sure, but at what cost? 

Spoilers and Review:

So basically what goes down is that Carly Beth gets her scary mask and scares her friends and is thrilled to be scary instead of scared for once but then she keeps getting super angry and can't seem to control herself and almost strangles her friend at one point and steals candy from small children. 

Meanwhile her mom made this sculpture of her daughter's face and Carly Beth steals it to take trick or treating as an extra prop and then at some point throws it on the ground and leaves it behind.

Once she realizes she can't get the mask off she runs back to the store where she got it from and the store owner tells her that he didn't want to sell her the mask because he knew she wouldn't be able to take it off, something about creating faces as experiments and keeping the failed outcomes in the back of his store or whatever, and then he explains that the mask can be removed once with a symbol of love and then all the other masks chase Carly Beth down the street and she finds her head sculpture and somehow that allows her to take the mask off.

Then she goes home and hugs her mom and her little brother puts the mask on! The horror! The end. 

This story is so unique and specific to Goosebumps that it has become an instant classic to me. The trajectory that Carly Beth follows from scared to scary to a combination of the two is very compelling, and the idea of being unable to remove a tight mask from your face is honestly pretty scary. It's a very relatable panicked sensation. 

I think the ending was a bit sloppy. I think the piece about the shop owner who created the mask leaves a lot of unanswered questions and then the solution about only being able to remove the mask once with a symbol of love while ignoring the other time she already took off the mask kind of lost me. 

I will say that the TV episodes are probably even better than the book which I don't think I've thought about any of them so far. (I don't know if I've talked at all about the TV show but I've been watching the corresponding episode(s) after each book I've read and let me tell you, they are a hoot and a half.) The on-screen version really cleared up most of the loose ends that the book leaves which I appreciate. 

The Rating: 

For being so unique and so classic I'm going to have to give this one a pretty high ranking! But then I also realized I can't stop thinking about Welcome to Camp Nightmare which I found to be truly horrifying so I think I'm actually going to move that one up to first, and then entirely rearranged my ranking again. Surprise! Definitely still subject to change, I still have my doubts about my overall ranking. 

1. Welcome to Camp Nightmare (#9)
2. Night of the Living Dummy (#7)
3. Stay Out of the Basement (#2)
4. The Haunted Mask (#11)
5. The Girl Who Cried Monster (#8)
6. Welcome to Dead House (#1)
7. Say Cheese and Die! (#4)
8. Let's Get Invisible! (#6)
9. The Ghost Next Door (#10)
10. Monster Blood (#3)
11. The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (#5)

The next book in the line is Be Careful What You Wish For...