“Every camp has its own ghost story…”
Among a group of twenty-two kids riding the bus to summer camp at “Camp Nightmoon,” we meet twelve-year-old Billy whose parents are celebrated scientists. Aboard the bus, Billy befriends a chubby boy named Mike and several others. After a trademark Goosebumps chapter-ending jump scare, in which the bus driver wears a monster mask as a joke, the campers are all dropped off at a remote spot in the middle of nowhere where they are seemingly attacked by a band of strange creatures who appear to be shadowy wolflike creatures who make shrill howling cries.
Billy and the others are petrified but they are rescued by a shotgun-wielding camp leader named “Big Al” who takes them back to their wooded cabins. Billy and Mike’s cabin is accompanied by a shifty camp counselor named Larry. All throughout the story, Larry seems suspicious and distant from the kids (at one point, he even angrily chucks a ball at a camper’s head, injuring him, but afterward Larry immediately denies any culpability). When all the campers are gathered, Big Al explains the rules of camp –no one is allowed to cross the river into the girls’ camp and no one is allowed to enter the “Forbidden Bunk,” a shadowy cabin that has been boarded up for many years. None of the campers know exactly what happened to the Forbidden Bunk, but at night they hear animalistic cries emanating from within. Rumors abound that it is haunted by a mysterious creature called “Sabre.”
“At the bottom of the hill, I stopped and gazed up at the Forbidden Bunk. It appeared to lean toward me in the pale starlight. I listened for the familiar howls that seemed to come from inside it. But tonight there was only heavy silence” (65).
Before long, kids start disappearing from camp without explanation –Mike sustains a snakebite and later his trunk and clothes are all cleaned out and Mike is never heard from again. Another boy named Roger visits the Forbidden Bunk and he is reportedly ‘torn apart’ by a creature, but when Billy asks Larry about it, Larry simply claims there never was a record of Roger at Camp Nightmoon. Something clearly is not right here.
In the book, there are a few more twists and turns as new campers arrive, replacing the former ones who disappeared, and Billy’s female friends, Dawn and Dori, swim across the water from the girls’ camp to report similar unsettling events on their end of the river. Billy tries to call home, but he finds the camp payphone is nothing more than a plastic prop. He also discovers that all the campers’ letters were never actually sent home, instead they were simply stuffed into a giant bag.
In the end, Larry takes Billy and two others on a canoeing trip during which Billy jumps into the cold swirling waters and rescues Larry after he falls overboard. And when they return to camp, Big Al leads Billy and others on a hike to hunt down reported escapees from the girls’ camp. When Big Al starts handing out rifles, Billy finally protests. He no longer wants to be a camper anymore. And this cues the most mediocre, unsatisfying twist ending I have yet encountered in a Goosebumps book: Big Al suddenly reveals that Billy’s whole experience at camp has secretly been a test this whole time. Camp Nightmoon is not actually a summer camp but a government testing lab: “Ok everyone! It’s over! He passed! Come out and congratulate him!” (134). All the people Billy has met have been mere pawns in this elaborate ploy. But why the test of Billy? Apparently, since Billy’s parents are important scientists, they have been wanting to bring Billy along on their next expedition but first they needed to test him to see if he would be fit for the voyage, since they are planning to travel to what is, perhaps, the most dangerous place in the known universe, “a very strange planet called Earth.”
So, in other words, Billy lives on a foreign planet and Camp Nightmoon has been nothing more than a big fraud meticulously designed all for his own conceit. But then what are we to make of the odd animal howling noises? And how about those strange wolflike creatures at the outset? What happened to the campers who were injured? Or the campers who disappeared? Where did they all go? Were they all just performing? Also is there anything more to the story of the Forbidden Cabin? What are we to make of all these unresolved plot threads? There are just too many unresolved questions with this one; it’s a real cop-out to suggest that the whole adventure was merely just a big test this whole time. While the opening of Welcome to Camp Nightmare introduced a variety of enticing and eerie plot threads, they ultimately went nowhere. Unfortunately, this underwhelming twist-ending renders Welcome to Camp Nightmare one of the worst Goosebumps books I have yet encountered, even if the double twist that Billy is from an alien planet reminded me a little bit of a classic Twilight Zone twist-ending, like the one in “Third From the Sun.”
Stine, R.L. Goosebumps: Welcome to Camp Nightmare. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1993.