“If you’re afraid of bees, I have to warn you – there are a lot of bees in this story. In fact, there are hundreds.”
Gary Lutz (“Lutz the Klutz”) is a clumsy, lonely, ostracized twelve-year-old boy. He doesn’t have many friends and he is often mocked, crashes his bike, and gets beat up at school by a trio of bullies named Barry, Marv, and Karl. He is especially terrified of bees. And it doesn’t help that his nextdoor neighbor, Mr. Andretti, is a beekeeper who likes to play pranks. Gary spends his miserable days reading comic books, dodging his nine-year-old sister Krissy, avoiding her cat named Claus, and playing computer games like “Planet Monstro.”
One day, he stumbles upon an online advertisement posted to an internet message board offering the chance to: “Take a vacation from yourself – change places with someone for a week!” The advertisement suggests people can accomplish a “person-to-person vacation” and when Gary visits the company’s office, he learns there is a boy named Dirk Davis who is willing to switch bodies with Gary. Dirk is much bigger than Gary and much more confident and popular. However, when the time finally comes for Gary to switch bodies with Dirk, Mr. Andretti’s bees escape and a few interfere with the body transfer machinery and, lo and behold, one lands on Gary and he is transferred into a bee’s body!
The rest of the book follows the silly misadventures of Gary as he buzzes around in the body of a bee, trying to avoid swats from people and attacks from animals. At one point, he enters Mr. Andretti’s hive with the rest of the bees, in another instance he is attacked by Claus the cat, and all the while he desperately tries to communicate with Dirk so they can switch back their bodies. In this situation, Dirk has entered Gary’s body, Gary has entered the body of a bee, and the bee has entered the body of Dirk. It creates a very silly conundrum.
And unfortunately, Dirk refuses to switch back bodies! To make matters worse, for some unknown reason, the company will not force a switchback (even though it had advertised only a weeklong body swap in the first place). Anyway, Gary buzzes over and helps Dirk attack the trio of school bullies: Barry, Marv, and Karl. Then, Gary confronts Dirk in his room, but still Dirk refuses to give up his body. In response, Gary stirs up a swarm of his fellow bees, they invade Gary’s room wherein Gary stings Dirk, until Gary finally awakens in his own body. In the end, Gary learns to truly appreciate his life and his family, and he is no longer afraid of bees… but a month later, as he sits out in his backyard, Gary decides to suddenly suck the pollen out of a nearby flower, thus leading us to wonder if Gary is still at least partly a bee…
Why I’m Afraid of Bees is a flimsy, one-dimensional Goosebumps book. It has some fun, silly science fiction elements with the accidental body transfer mishap, but the moral lesson exposited here couldn’t be more on the nose and one has to wonder what ever became of the body swapping technology. Did the company wind up facing lawsuits down the road? Apparently, this was one of the first books in the series to employ the use of ghostwriters (as revealed in a Parachute Press lawsuit) and it really shows. Why I’m Afraid of Bees is notably one of nineteen original books in the series that was never made into an episode of the television show and I have no qualms with that decision.
Stine, R.L. Why I’m Afraid of Bees. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1994.
Ha!! Great Goosebumps story! I bet Owen enjoys these books, too 🐝