“’Stay out of the basement!’ he bellowed in a voice they’d never heard before.”
After moving out to California, the Brewer family has hit a bit of a rut. Eleven-year-old Casey and his older sister Margaret have noticed that their father, the botanist Dr. Brewer, has been acting strangely. He doesn’t even call Margaret by his nickname “princess” anymore. Dr. Brewer recently lost his university job at PolyTech (at the request of the board) apparently for conducting experiments that apparently got out of control. Lately, he has been ignoring his children and spending all his time working in the basement, surrounded by his plants and a panoply of strange machines.
One day, Mrs. Brewer is called out of town to Tucson to visit her sister Eleanor in the hospital. In the meantime, Dr. Brewer strictly forbids Casey and Margaret from entering the basement. But, of course, when Dr. Brewer briefly leaves the kids at home alone, they decide to go down to the basement. There they find a collection of unusual machinery in a hot and humid climate –and a menagerie of creepy looming plants, all of them with long, dangling tendrils, that appear to be breathing and moaning. And the kids get the feeling that the plants are watching them.
Amidst several twists in the story, Dr. Brewer suffers a minor injury and his hand appears to be leaking green blood. And Margaret spots him furiously scarfing down plant food over the sink in the kitchen. Then he starts wearing a Dodger baseball cap which is later revealed to be hiding leaves sprouting out of his head! When confronted, he confesses that he has been attempting to construct a new type of plant –a half plant, half human.
But still… something doesn’t add up. Margaret spots an insect-ridden pile of dirt in her father’s bed at night. And Dr. Brewer tries to force his children to eat a disgusting plant mixture. Finally, Dr. Brewer’s old boss at PolyTech, Mr. Martinez, unexpectedly arrives at the house to witness his former employee’s experiments. But the kids never see Mr. Martinez leave the house and they later find his clothes folded along with his wallet in the basement. When Dr. Brewer travels to the airport to pick up his wife, the children finally discover the truth. In the basement, they hear a thumping sound coming from the closet. Inside, they find a group of plants with horrifying human features as well as the real Dr. Brewer tied up alongside Mr. Martinez. As it turns out, Dr. Brewer’s experiments had gotten completely out of control when he accidentally formed a new humanoid plant-like replica of himself.
“The father we’ve been living with? He’s a plant?”
Dr. Brewer grabs an axe as the other Dr. Brewer arrives back home with Mrs. Brewer and the scene quickly devolves into a stand-off to uncover the real Dr. Brewer. Which one is real? And which one is a plant? Eventually, Margaret figures it out when her real father calls her “princess” again. She cuts both men’s arms, but only one spills green blood –he is then axed and all is returned to normal. The real Dr. Brewer destroys nearly all of his experiments, only planting a few of the remaining plants in the yard. And later, as the story ends, one of the flowers outside shockingly starts talking to Margaret, saying “help me. Please – help me. I’m your father. Really! I’m your real father.”
One of the best tropes employed in the Goosebumps books is the repeated motif of children facing supernatural phenomena only to be gaslit by their sober-minded parents who don’t believe their silly and irrational antics. But in some of the books the parents eventually come to realize they were wrong to doubt the kids. As entertaining middle grade stories go, the Goosebumps books are successful because they vindicate the children’s perspective –these books take kids’ fears and anxieties seriously. Sometimes these fears come in the form of ghosts, zombies, or mummies; and other times they show us fears about bullying, losing friends, and absentee fathers. Stay Out of the Basement is an example of the latter. It is nevertheless a charming installment in the Goosebumps series; a suburban tale about a mad scientist whose experiments have run amok while at the same time he seemingly buries himself in work to avoid his children. It features plenty of body horror and heart-pumping suspense (in some ways it is reminiscent of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau). Stay Out of the Basement comes very much recommended from me.
Stine, R.L. Goosebumps: Stay Out of the Basement. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1992.