“I’m not a dream. I’m a nightmare!”
Kris and Lindy Powell are nearly identical twins, aside from their hairstyles. They are fairly typical twelve-year-old kids: they have a black dog named “Barky,” Kris collects jewelry, her friend is a boy named Cody Matthews, and she has a crush on Robby Martin; while Lindy’s best friend is Alice and wears her blonde hair in a pony tail. As such, they are fiercely competitive with one another. On one beautiful spring day, they venture over to a neighboring house that is under construction. There, inside a large black dumpster, Lindy finds a lifelike ventriloquist dummy that looks like a child. He has blue eyes that can move side to side but cannot blink, brown hair, and bright red painted lips as well as a gray suit with a red bow tie. “She stared into the dummy’s bright blue painted eyes. To her surprise, the dummy seemed to be staring back at her, a twinkle of sunlight in his eyes, his grin wide and knowing” (15). Lindy decides to name him Slappy.
Over the coming days, Lindy practices her ventriloquist routine, performing in front of friends and family. She is even offered $20 to perform her act at a neighboring birthday party for Amy Marshall (one of two kids –Amy and Ben Marshall– she sometimes babysits). Soon, Lindy’s twin sister Kris grows jealous and wants a dummy of her own. Her wish comes true when their father, Mr. Powell, comes home from a work trip to Portland. And, lo and behold, he gifts Kris a ventriloquist dummy he bought from a pawnbroker. The new dummy is dressed in blue jeans, white high-top sneakers, and a red and green flannel shirt. Kris names him “Mr. Wood.”
However, ominous creepy things start happening (some of which are later revealed to be practical jokes by Kris’s sister Lindy), and there is a particularly spooky scene of Kris waking up from a nightmare to find one of the dummies (Slappy) seated in a chair staring at her in the night. But when Kris notices a small folded up paper inside Mr. Wood’s pocket, she reads the mysterious written words on the note (“Karru marri odnna loma molonu karrano”) and he slowly comes to life. Mr. Wood torments the Powell household in the night and sabotages Kris’s ventriloquist act during the day by issuing crude insults to audience members (“stupid moron!” and “Stupid jerk!”) which happens when family friends, the Millers, come over to the house and watch the girls’ ventriloquism performances. But when Kris performs her act at the Spring Concert, Mr. Wood starts denigrating Mrs. Berman, the music teacher, for her weight and age before spewing out a green putrid slime from his mouth, causing a mass evacuation of the students.
Kris gets in trouble with her parents (who do not believe that her dummy has come to life), and this leads to a dramatic scuffle in the middle of the night, with Mr. Wood yelling at her, calling her his “slave.” He claims the whole house now belongs to him, and he thanks Kris for repeating the ancient words from a “sorcerer” which were folded up in his pocket –these ancient words make him come to life.
The girls try a number of different things in an effort to kill Mr. Wood, but nothing works (including re-reading the ancient words). They even lock Mr. Wood inside a suitcase and bury him deep in the yard only, to wake up and find him calmly seated at their kitchen counter in the morning. In the end, they eventually drag Mr. Wood out to be crushed by a steamroller, an event that eviscerates his body and turns his head to dust. While being crushed, Mr. Wood emits a mysterious green gas that smells like rotten eggs. In the end, the apologetic steamroller driver picks up Mr. Wood’s mangled body tosses him in the trash. Relieved, Lindy and Kris walk back home in the rain to find the window open in their room. When Kris tries to close it, suddenly Slappy reaches up and grabs her hand: “‘Hey slave – is that other guy gone?’ the dummy asked in a throaty growl. ‘I thought he’d never leave!’” (134).
Night of the Living Dummy is another richly imagined urban legend, it contains echoes of many classic Twilight Zone episodes like “Living Doll” “Caesar and Me” and “The Dummy,” as well as even the “Chucky” film series. R.L. Stine later stated his inspiration for the book came from Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio and William Goldman’s Magic, and of course the title playfully draws on “Night of the Living Dead.” There are other unique allusions in the book, for example at one point, there is a reference to the foundational early 20th century ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his character Charlie McCarthy! It offers us a nice reminder that Goosebumps comes down to us from a tradition of popular ventriloquism and puppetry. In Night of the Living Dummy, once again, children’s horror tropes are woven through, particularly the trope of parents gaslighting their children while something supernatural is unfolding. In this case it is employed to great effect; Lindy and Kris’s mom is ceaselessly distracted by her daughters’ competitiveness and combativeness that she will not listen to their claims about a doll coming to life –”They won’t believe us. If we wake them up, we’ll be in even bigger trouble.” While there is nothing really shocking or unpredictable in Night of the Living Dummy –I mean, the idea of an evil ventriloquist dummy coming to life is not exactly new territory—this book is still a highlight, not least of which for the eerie cliffhanger at the end. It is one of the Goosebumps books in which the children are not vindicated with their parents –Kris and Lindy keep the secret of Mr. Wood to themselves, setting up future sequels nicely. And all in all, it makes sense that Slappy has become the unofficial Goosebumps mascot, even if his debut in the series, Night of the Living Dummy (the first of books to come), mostly follows the villainy of Mr. Wood instead.
Stine, R.L. Goosebumps: Night of the Living Dummy. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1993.
Slappy became one of the few Goosebumps characters to make repeated entries. Monster blood (though not a character) was another item that got sequelized.