Goosebumps book 9: Welcome to Camp Nightmare - It's the little camp of horrors!

Brief Summary: 

It's Billy's first time at summer camp and it's pretty weird. His campmates keep disappearing and the counselors and camp director don't seem to care! None of their letters are being sent and the only phone doesn't work so there is no way for Billy to get help. What could be going on?

Spoilers and Review:

Let me start by saying this is the scariest one so far. Like the idea of being at summer camp and having your friends go missing and none of the adults believe you, in fact, having the adults actively deny that they were even there in the first place, would be horrifying for a child. I think the total is like five of Billy's friends who disappear and no one cares! And then the thing with the letters not being sent and the phone not being real, I mean it's honestly a real for real horror movie scenario.

And there's this crazy part where one kid gets bitten by a snake and it swells up a bunch and no one will treat it, and there's this other part where the counselor maliciously throws a baseball at the back of another kid's head and essentially knocks him out which is wild, I mean it gets pretty serious.

The twist ending also got me, I was trying to figure out the whole time how they would make it kid friendly in the end because all I could think was that the counselors were some sort of monster and they were feeding on the campers, like they trapped them there to eat them, but, well let me explain it first. 

So we get to the last few chapters, the entire camp is told they are going on an early morning hike through the woods, then they all stop and are handed GUNS and are told to SHOOT THE MISSING CAMPERS FROM THE GIRLS CAMP! They turn out to be tranquilizer guns but STILL! That is so freaking scary. 

Anyways, Billy is all defiant and says he won't do it and shoots the director instead and the director is like "yay congratulations you did it you passed!" And all of a sudden all the kids are back and Billy's parents are there and everyone is okay and the explanation is that Billy's parents are scientists and wanted to take him with them on an upcoming expedition and it was all set up by the government to test him. 

Which, I mean, I would've been satisfied with just that to be honest because it was not the ending I had anticipated, but then Billy finds out his parents want to take him to "the most dangerous place in the universe" and Billy is like, "where?" and his parents are like, "a very strange planet called Earth," and I was like "OMG AMAZING" because that little tidbit was just so unnecessary and I was thrilled. 

I will say that I then told my roommates about the story and the ending because I live for the twist endings and they were like, "yeah obviously that's what happened" so maybe no one else was surprised or impressed but I sure was. 

The Rating: 

This was a hard decision for me but I'm putting it at #2, because as much as I love Stay Out of the Basement, this one was honestly so scary the whole time and I felt like there was plenty happening throughout the story and the twist was like cool and then taken too far which is really all I could ever ask from Goosebumps I think. So here we are. 

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

#10 is The Ghost Next Door which I'm pretty pumped for because I think I've heard about this one for some reason which probably means it'll be a fun one.