“It’s a real dead end.”
Erin Wright and her best friend Marty love horror movies, especially the “Shocker on Shock Street” series. They begin the book watching Shocker on Shock Street VI, a scary movie featuring a wolf-crab creature and Electric Eel Woman. Marty always pretends not to be scared (he thought Shocker on Shock Street V was scarier). They pay a visit to Erin’s dad in his office. He has the unique job of building theme parks. He designed all the rides and dinosaur robots in “Prehistoric Park,” and his office is filled with movie and theme park memorabilia.
Presently, Erin’s dad is developing the Shocker Studio Tour, a ride through the set of the Shocker on Shock Street set not unlike the Universal backlot tour. And lo and behold, he wants Erin and Marty to test out the ride before it is open to the public. Greatly excited, the next day Erin and Marty hop aboard the automated tramcar and enjoy the spooky ride. Marty wants to see classic Shocker characters like Shockro, Wolf Boy, Wolf Girl, the Piranha People, Captain Sick, The Great Gopher Mutant, and others. The only rule is that they cannot exit the tramcar nor walk along Shock Street set. Erin asks her dad if her mom can come along, but he simply gives her a strange look.
Erin’s dad says there are still a few bugs to work out in the system before they are greeted by a red-haired tour guide named Linda. She hands the two children a toy gun called the “Shocker Stun Ray Blaster” (it looks like something out of Star Trek) because she says it can freeze monsters in their tracks from twenty feet away. The kids are both skeptical.
Naturally, the ride quickly becomes terrifying as Erin and Marty encounter shrieking skeletons on a wild roller-coaster racing through the Haunted House of Horror, and a sign reading “ABANDON ALL HOPE.” Then they find themselves in total darkness, surrounded by suspected bats, and evil laughter, trapped inside a cave, with slithering slimy worms dropped onto their heads, and hundreds of spiders surrounding them. But the real kicker comes when they are attacked by giant salivating praying mantis creatures who spit hot sticky goo. None of these creatures seem to be animatronic and the kids only manage to escape by pretending to squish them like bugs by stepping on the mantis’s feet.
The tram stops and, of course, the two kids get off the ride and wind up stuck in an old cemetery and attacked by toothless green creatures crawling out the graves, as well as oozing mud that turns into quick sand and a terrifying pack of werewolves hunting them down (initially posing as Wolf Boy and Wolf Girl). Unfortunately, the ray guns provided by Linda are useless (what was the point of the ray guns?). Eventually, Erin and Marty manage to reconnect with the moving tram, fleeing from laughing skeletons as their tram starts speeding the wrong way. Desperate to find Erin’s father again, the twist comes when they suddenly happen upon the park director named Russ Denver who shouts, “Cut! Print that one! Good scene everyone!” He says this has all been part of an elaborate movie in the Shock Street series that is intended to star Erin and Marty. But then they spot a plug behind Russ Denver… as it turns out he is also a robot! In a scuffle, he electrocutes Marty. Then Erin turns around and sees her father and she rushes to him. But something is not right. He doesn’t seem like her real father and Erin starts speaking incoherently as she is suddenly shut down.
In the end, Erin and Marty were merely robots all along, built by Mr. Wright to test the park before real children can arrive, and they both have been malfunctioning (hence why he gave Erin such a strange look when she asked if her mom could tag along for the ride). He hauls the two robots off with his studio engineer, Jared Curtis, for repairs.
My Thoughts on A Shocker on Shock Street
Apparently, R.L. Stine was inspired to write this one after visiting Universal Studios and wondering what might happen if the robotic attractions came to life. The title was evidently borrowed from A Nightmare on Elm Street and while this Hollywood backlot adventure starts out with a compelling enough premise, the book starts to drag midway through as Erin and Marty face an endless circus of spooky monsters and far too many jokey jump scares. The twist ending is fairly ridiculous, in the same vein as other eye-rolling Goosebumps twist-endings like in Welcome to Camp Nightmare. However, as horror theme park stories go, I found A Shocker on Shock Street to be somewhere on par with One Day at Horrorland.
Corresponding Episode Review
In the episode, Erin’s dad is portrayed as more of an evil genius/mad scientist which is amusing, and the horrors Erin and Marty experience are a bit different from the book. Additionally, there is another twist ending in the episode in which Erin and Marty (as robots) resist efforts to be deactivated and they, instead, seek revenge on Erin’s dad. But the episode is, unsurprisingly, little more than a campy, low-budget footnote to the book.
Stine, R.L. A Shocker on Shock Street. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1995.