“We used to live in your house…”
Reader beware – you’re in for a scare! On a little nostalgia trip, I decided to read a few classic Goosebumps books for fun, and there’s no better place to start than with R.L. Stine’s debut Goosebumps book Welcome to Dead House. This surprisingly spooky children’s horror novel is filled with terror and gore –it is still pretty spooky for a middle-grade book!
It is the middle of July when our narrator, 12-year-old Amanda Benson, moves to a new town called Dark Falls with her family –both of her parents, her white curly-haired terrier named “Petey,” and her slightly spoiled 11-year-old brother Josh. Her father’s great-uncle has passed away and left a large mansion to the Bensons. Amanda’s father has never heard of this uncle, but the move will give him the chance to quit his boring office job and become a writer.
When they arrive at the house, both Amanda and Josh are afraid and their dog Petey starts barking incessantly, particularly at their realtor named Mr. Dawes (who wears a wide-brimmed Stetson hat). The weather is warm but the house remains cold, shrouded in shade by large surrounding trees and dead crunchy leaves on the ground. Needless to say, creepy things start happening –Amanda starts seeing a little boy watching her inside her house, she and Josh hear whispers and giggling in the night, a little girl appears in the hallway and then disappears, and Amanda’s curtains start billowing even though her window is shut. Amanda has a gruesome dream about her dead family as skeletons while there is an aggressive banging on the door –this scene offers a remarkable bit of horror-writing, truly impressive. And, of course, the delightfully frustrating trope of parents doubting and gaslighting their children is masterfully employed in this book.
In time, they meet a little neighborhood boy named Ray who claims he used to live in the Bensons’ new house. Then they meet other children, some of whom also profess to having lived in the house before. But something is not right. The other kids start to form a terrifying enclosed circle around Amanda and Josh –until Mr. Dawes suddenly interrupts this strange game. That night, Amanda’s parents attend a party but they don’t return. At 2am, Josh awakens Amanda in alarm –Petey has gone missing! Grabbing a flashlight, Josh leads Amanda out to the cemetery.
Shockingly, in the middle of the night, they bump into Ray who desperately tries to persuade them not to go to the cemetery. But they go anyway, only to find Petey is not behaving like himself, he is acting strangely, as if he doesn’t recognize hos owners, and his eyes are now red. The flashlight flashes on the gravestones in the cemetery, revealing the names of the other children in town! After spotting Ray’s grave, Amanda and Josh confront Ray who confesses they are all actually dead, or rather the “living dead.” Years ago, the town of Dark Falls had a plastic factory that accidentally released a yellow gas that killed everyone. Now they lure a new family each year to live in the “dead house” using the fake great-uncle inheritance ploy. They need to feast on blood each year. However, the living dead are vulnerable to light so Josh flashes his flashlight onto Ray’s face which immediately a horrifying hole, melts his skin, and begins to disintegrate his body.
Josh and Amanda run away, bump into Mr. Dawes, and rush to a large amphitheater near the cemetery where they find their parents tied up and the whole town seated around them, waiting to harvest their blood. But there is a large tree shading the amphitheater, and in the early morning light above, Josh and Amanda manage to crack the tree and push it over. The sunlight elicits shrieks and screams from the living the dead as the whole town is melted and disintegrated right before their eyes. After rescuing their parents, the Bensons quickly flee from Dark Falls back to their original home (luckily, they never managed to sell it). And as they are leaving, Amanda thinks she sees Mr. Dawes welcoming a new family to the dead house…
“’Where is everyone?’ I asked, looking up and down the empty street. ‘It’s really dead around here, huh?’
He chuckled. ‘Yeah. I guess you could say that,’ he said.”
I found Welcome to Dead House to be a wonderfully unsettling children’s horror novel. The corresponding television episode of the same name takes some notable departures from the original book (I much preferred the book). Its allure comes from its lingering uncertainty. What has happened to the town of Dark Falls? Is it populated with vampires? Ghosts? Zombies? The book is never really clear exactly what they are, nor about the rules of their existence, but the ambiguity only adds to the terror of Welcome to Dead House. Did the whole town actually die? Or does the ending imply that the living dead are still out there, waiting to harvest their next victim? Apparently, a sequel was never published within the Goosebumps series so we will never know what happened to Dark Falls. For readers wishing to take a little trip down memory lane, I would highly recommend diving into these Scholastic Books from yesteryear. There is no better place to start than with Welcome to Dead House.
Stine, R.L. Goosebumps: Welcome to Dead House. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1992.