“You see monsters everywhere…”
Told as a first-person narrative by twelve-year-old Lucy Dark, The Girl Who Cried Monster is another charmingly simple, darkly atmospheric Goosebumps book that still manages to startle readers with an abrupt twist-ending that comes completely out of left field. The town of Timberland Falls is filled with tall lush forests. Here, Lucy loves telling scary monster stories to her friends and family, particularly her six-year-old chubby brother Randy (who loves collecting comic books). Poor young Randy has run off crying so many to his parents that they roll their eyes when she tells monster stories now.
However, it is summer and Lucy’s parents have enrolled in a reading program offered through the local library. Each week she meets with the librarian, Mr. Mortman, to discuss the book she read and potentially earn a gold star. Lucy prefers to read scary mystery novels, but Mr. Mortman wants her to read “classics” like Huckleberry Finn, Frankenstein, and Anne of Green Gables. The library is an old house at the far edge of town; it was once the home of an old hermit who died and the house was converted into the local library. Now many kids believe the building is haunted. Indeed, it is a very tall creaky house with old wooden bookshelves stretching to the ceiling, “I had this frightening feeling that the shelves would lean in on me, cover me up, and I’d be buried there in the darkness forever. Buried under a thousand pounds of dusty, mildewy old books” (20).
The children all find Mr. Mortman grotesque –he is short and round, with beady eyes, a shiny bald head, and his hands are always inexplicably wet. At his large hulking librarian’s desk, he keeps his pet turtles whom he calls “my timid friends.” One evening after meeting with Mr. Mortman, Lucy leaves her rollerblades behind and ventures back into the library after-hours only to find Mr. Mortman creepily humming to himself with only the sound of a tick-tocking clock. Lucy tries to be silent as she watches his head suddenly start inflating like a balloon while his eyes bulge out on stems like insect antennae. Lucy watches in horror as he opens a jar filled with flies and instead of feeding them to his turtles, he swallows them himself! Later, Lucy spots him gobbling down his turtles, as well, crunching on their shells as they are tossed into his gaping mouth filled with yellow teeth.
“Mr. Mortman, I realized, was a monster” (29).
Lucy desperately tries to convince her family and best friend Aaron Messer that Mr. Mortman is a monster, but after years of making up monster stories, nobody believes her. She sneaks into the library again –this time with her camera– and when she accidentally leaves the flash on, this leads to a dramatic conflict as the monstrous Mr. Mortman realizes someone is inside the library with him. Lucy narrowly manages to escape and quickly tries to develop the picture with her family. But when she sees the photograph… Mr. Mortman is not there! As a monster, he doesn’t appear in photographs, or so Lucy concludes. Next, she persuades her friend Aaron to help follow Mr. Mortman home one night where she spots him eating snails out of a large aquarium. And finally, she meets with Mr. Mortman one last time in the library for the Reading Rangers program (at her mother’s insistence) and, with a malicious smile on his face, he locks her inside and transforms into a monster again.
“‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a throaty growl. ‘But I can’t let you leave, Lucy. I cant let you leave the library’” (125).
Lucy flees the library in terror, but this time Aaron sees it all. They both rush back to Lucy’s parents to explain the whole situation. This time, because Aaron is involved, Lucy’s parents believe her. They decide to invite Mr. Mortman over for dinner in a few days to straighten things out. But when the day comes, as Mr. Mortman keeps shooting side glances at Lucy, until he politely asks what’s for dinner, to which her parents respond “you are!” and they suddenly pounce on him, with fangs protruding from their mouths, swallowing him up, bones and all. They say that Mr. Mortman was the first monster in Timberland Falls in nearly twenty years, while reminding Lucy that her fangs will grow in a few years.
“We can’t allow any other monsters in town. It would frighten the whole community. And we don’t want people to get frightened and chase us away. We like it here!” (136).
The Girl Who Cried Monster is saturated with a captivating, ominous atmosphere, particularly in its depictions of Timberland Falls and the dark, shadowy, creaky old library, which is like something straight out of EC Comics’ “Tales of the Crypt.” Here Goosebumps takes something ordinary, like a summer Reading Rangers program, and gives it a distorted twist. The Girl Who Cried Monster also presents a cartoonishly grotesque body horror story, as Mr. Mortman is a wholly disgusting figure, yet exactly the kind of hulking oddball one might expect to find running a community library in a small town like Timberland Falls. The invocation of disgust in this one reminded me in some ways of an earlier Goosebumps book: Stay out of the Basement. With a nice moral lesson as its Aesopian namesake suggests coupled with more wonderful cover artwork by Tim Jacobus, The Girl Who Cried Monster is a quintessential work in the Goosebumps canon.
Stine, R.L. The Girl Who Cried Monster. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1993.