“No one really believes in the Mud Monsters anymore. That’s just a stupid old fairy tale…”
You Can’t Scare Me! follows a group of sixth graders who relentlessly try to bully and scare their know-it-all classmate Courtney. But every time they try to embarrass her, it only seems to fail and backfire on them. The book is told from the first-person perspective of Eddie as he and his friends, Herbie “Hat,” Molly, and Charlene, become bitter and resentful toward Courtney’s confidence and intelligence. She is constantly bragging about being right. From a stormy school field trip at the Greene Forest to a hidden treehouse located near the Muddy Creek swamp, Courtney is unfazed by things that scare Eddie and friends, like snakes, bees, tarantulas, cats in trees, Charlene’s big Saint Bernard “Buttercup,” and others.
The book gets fairly tedious as every attempt to prank Courtney backfires, but in the end he when he learns she actually believes in monsters, he finally decides to scare her using an old legend about Muddy Creek. As the story goes, there once was a settler community that was rejected by the local townsfolk and forced to live out near the swamp. But eventually the bog overflowed and swallowed them up. Now, every year on the full moon, they rise up and seek revenge as the “Mud Monsters,” half-human and half-dead creatures who hunt down the townsfolk from the depths of the swamp. But this is all just a legend, right?
Eddie convinces his brother Kevin and his friends, who have been filming a movie about the monsters, to actually use their Mud Monster costumes to terrify Courtney out at Muddy Creek. But when the night finally comes, and the darkness settles in out at the swamp under the full moon as Courtney walks up, they are all shocked and horrified when dozens of real Mud Monsters come rising out of the swamp! They run back home, shocked that the legend of the Mud Monsters was real this whole time. Naturally, at school Courtney brags about being right about the existence of monsters.
While the legend of the Mud Monsters is an intriguing premise to You Can’t Scare Me!, this is still a fairly mediocre Goosebumps book. I suppose it has a partial anti-bullying message as well as a moral lesson about misplaced envy toward precocious know-it-alls, but I would place this book alongside other lesser books in the Goosbumps canon like Monster Blood, Welcome to Camp Nightmare, and Be Careful What You Wish For… At least You Can’t Scare Me! had an interesting urban legend about the Mud Monsters and a reasonable twist ending (unlike Welcome to Camp Nightmare, and Be Careful What You Wish For…). But by far the most praiseworthy aspect of this book is Tim Jacobus’s gripping cover artwork –I remember being mesmerized as it sat on my shelf as a kid.
Stine, R.L. You Can’t Scare Me! Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1994.