How About That Thing?

The Haunted Mask was one of my all-time favorite Goosebumps books. And I think it’s safe to say that I wasn’t alone in that preference, for a change. In my research, The Haunted Mask is apparently one of, if not THE most popular Goosebumps story in the entire series.

So much so, in fact, they made a straight-to-video adaptation, as opposed to making it part of the TV series proper. Very few Goosebumps books were given such a privilege.

It was also such a popular story that R.L. Stine actually wrote a sequel: The Haunted Mask 2. I’d say that this is also a privilege most Goosebumps books didn’t get… Though Monster Blood got, like, four or five sequels, and I vaguely remember that one being kind of lame even back then. But I digress.

The Haunted Mask is a story of a girl who’s afraid of everything. Carlie Beth, a name that screams trailer park in any other context, is a coward. She’s afraid of everything, almost to a comical level.

Enter Steve and Chuck: a duo of bullies who remind me of Bulk and Skull if they were written by Stephen King. They’re idiots who’d probably have unintentionally catchy music following them wherever they go and what they do, yet as memory serves, they were pretty one-dimensional. Then again, there was only ONE Haunted Mask book at the time. You’ll see what I mean later.

Carlie Beth vows revenge after they fake a tarantula escape, and absolutely humiliate her in front of everyone at the science fair. And I guess the teachers just let them get away with that. I’d say it’s because it’s the 90s, remembering all the “playful homophobia” the kids I knew at that exact same age were flinging about and getting away with… Except I’m not entirely sure THAT excuse works here. Hell, I still remember a time in middle school when the principal came into my English class, and declared that if anybody made fun of the incoming student for dying his hair lemon-yellow, we’d be getting detention for a week. Either these teachers are severely unprofessional, or Steve and Chuck practically LIVE in detention and everybody’s just given up on them ever graduating from fifth grade. I don’t know, I’m probably thinking too hard on this.

Carlie Beth decides that the perfect way to get revenge would be to find a super spooky mask at the new mask shop, and scare the two little shits right back. Which… On one hand, maybe not MY first choice. On the other hand, MY first choice probably would’ve involved a chainsaw, an acid bath, and me moving several states away and changing my name to Juan Pedro till the heat died down. So yeah, maybe I’m not the person who you should be consulting for revenge plots.

Carlie Beth looks at all the masks, and finds them rather uninspiring… Right up until she discovers the back room. There, some really grotesque masks are just hanging on the walls. The clerk insists those masks aren’t for sale… Which begs the question of why you have them up for display in the first place. Seriously, this guy’s had YEARS to just stuff them in a trunk and hide them in the basement, but he actually has them up on display in a back room where ANYBODY could walk in, and be like: “Ooh, don’t mind if I do!”

To make matters worse, he actually sells Carlie Beth the mask! Like, yeah, if he didn’t, there wouldn’t be a story, but looking back on it now, this really could’ve been handled better. Like…. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe Carlie Beth STEALS the mask when the guy isn’t looking after being told no. Maybe she sneaks back in after hours and swipes it. But no.

“I want that mask,” says Carlie Beth.

“You can’t have that mask,” says the clerk. “It’s evil and will almost definitely come back to bite you in the end. I can’t have that on my conscience.”

“I’ll give you ten bucks.”

“SOLD!”

The sad part is Carlie Beth probably would’ve been willing to go as high as twenty. But I digress.

Carlie Beth tests the mask out by scaring her little brother. Once that’s a success, she goes out into the wilderness that is her quaint little town on Halloween, and indeed manages to scare Steve and Chuck stupider.

With her thirst for revenge thoroughly quenched, she tries to take off the mask. Only to find that, to her horror, it won’t come off! To make matters worse, the personality associated with the mask is slowly beginning to take over!

She goes back to the mask shop… And this is where the story starts to get a little silly.

For starters, the guy KNEW this exact thing was going to happen. And yet, he sold her the mask anyway. Because HEY, TEN BUCKS! That’s like fifty in 90s money.

On top of being reminded of how this was so avoidable, we then find out that before he sold Halloween costumes, our faithful shopkeeper was a scientist who hoped to develop a mask that could cover his imperfections. Unfortunately, all his attempts turned into the hideous abominations that are in the back room.

I’m guessing there’s a reason why he kept these failures around all these years. Maybe to remind him of his own hubris. Maybe he didn’t want anybody else to fall victim to the masks like Carlie Beth did. I’m sure he had SOME good reason for keeping these clearly dangerous artifacts around, but again, maybe displaying them in an easily accessible back room wasn’t the greatest idea.

And just in case that one point I keep harping on isn’t enough, all the masks suddenly come alive and start chasing Carlie Beth. Because… Uh… Yeah, I got nothing. I wouldn’t even call this chase sequence a plot twist. I guess when I was ten, it was kind of cool, but looking back on it here and now, it kind of feels… Unnecessary.

Before the chase, Carlie Beth revealed that she was actually able to peal off the mask before. The shopkeeper tells her that if this is true, there might still be hope. Carlie Beth can remove the mask one more time, but she needs a symbol of love to overcome the creature that’s slowly trying to take her over.

That symbol of love? A ceramic model of Carlie Beth’s head that her mother made. I’ll admit, even back then, that seemed like such an odd choice, but whatever.

The mask is off, Carlie Beth is cured of the effects of the mask, and everybody lives happily ever after. Except Carlie Beth’s brother, who promptly puts on the mask after Carlie Beth discards it. Which I got to say, that was actually one of the better R.L. Stein twists. Like, maybe it wasn’t MINDBLOWING, but it worked.

The story overall is fine. Yeah, I rag on the shopkeeper for not doing a very good job of hiding the masks, and an even worse job of chasing Carlie Beth away, but those glitches in story telling not withstanding, I’ve definitely read worse. Hell, I read worse IN THIS SERIES. For example…

Ah yes, The Haunted Mask 2. If ever there was a book that felt like a chore, it was this one.

Not going to lie, when I first picked it up back in the day, I genuinely thought they were going to do something about Carlie Beth’s brother who’d put the mask on at the very end. Like, since HE never wore the mask at any point, does he get the same deal where he has to find a symbol of love in order to pull it off? Maybe he develops a love for being a monster and doesn’t WANT to take it off, and Carlie Beth has to find a way to get the mask off of him herself? Lots of potential… But they went with a completely different plot.

For starters, the whole thing with Carlie Beth’s brother gets completely and totally retconned, as memory serves. That much in of itself is lame.

Second, Steve and Chuck are the protagonists this time. You know, the one-dimensional bullies who got their come-uppins in book 1? Yeah, they’re the protagonists now. And not in that ironic, unreliable narrator way, either.

Now, to be fair, maybe the duo was charismatic enough to warrant this. Hell, you have any idea how close Bulk and Skull came to getting their own show? And they were usually the bad guys, whenever the monster of the day wasn’t around.

The plot is about as uninspired as it gets. You already know that by virtue of calling it The Haunted Mask 2, one of these two hurr-durrs is going to find a mask that sticks to their face and ruins their life. In this case, it was Steve. Furthermore, this time around, the costume shop is either out of business, or it made like Spirit Halloween and went into hibernation. He finds the mask he wants, one of the grotesque ones, in a trunk, and puts it on without even thinking about it. And the one mulligan I’m giving this book is that this made more sense than Haunted Mask 1. He finds a mask in a closed down shop, he has no one to warn him of how evil the mask is, and he puts it on, only to realize he can’t take it off. It’s literally the only thing about this book that works.

And who is he getting revenge against? Is there a bully even bigger than him and Chuck? Did chuck betray him? Hell, is he pissed about Carlie Beth scaring the pants off of him with HER haunted mask? Frankly, all of these and more would’ve probably made for better stories…

But no. He’s getting revenge on the peewee soccer team he’s coaching because they called him a stupid cuck. Well, okay, they didn’t use the term cuck in the 90s, but you get the idea. They made fun of him, and now, he’s after revenge.

And apparently, Carlie Beth scaring him and Chuck shitless was enough to warrant him changing his ways and becoming friends with Carlie Beth. Which I call bullshit on. I mean yeah, I probably have no room to talk, having had a friendship or two start off with me and the other guy hating each others’ guts initially, but I have a REALLY hard time believing this was all water under the bridge.

Rather than turn Steve into a horrible monster, though, the mask just ages him by about sixty years. The kids who once mocked him and called him a beta male are now being nice to him, and helping him across the street. So forth, and so on.

The only thing that made this story REMOTELY interesting was that the symbol of love method ends up not working on Steve. He tries multiple examples of symbols of love, only to find the mask won’t come off. Which leads Carlie Beth to believe that each mask must come with its own rules.

So how do they get the mask off? Simple: they go back to the costume shop, and find ANOTHER trunk that’s full of costumes that go with the masks.

I know, right?

This was so dumb, it’s amazing I even bothered finishing the book. Yeah, there were only, like, one or two chapters left, but even then, this had to be the dumbest solution you could think of. Primarily because there was never any mention of any corresponding costumes in book 1 at any point. When did this guy develop the costumes? And why are we only just now becoming aware of them?

Furthermore, once the mask figures out the costume is right there in front of it, it peals itself off of Steve’s mask, attaches to the thin air atop the costume’s collar, and the newly formed abomination wanders off into the night, never to be heard from again.

At no point does anybody think that maybe having this newly formed monster wandering around town unsupervised might be a bad thing. At no point does anybody attempt to subdue the monster. Hell, the monster doesn’t even chase them, as memory serves! He just forms, makes his way out of the building, and I guess that’s just it.

In any case, the mask is off, and Steve can return to a normal life. Only to find out that Chuck ended up getting revenge on behalf of Steve with a mask that HE found, and can’t take off.

And that pretty much does it.

The first Haunted Mask book was not without some hiccups here and there, but it was an okay story. Definitely one I’d recommend to kids looking for a good, easy Halloween read.

The Haunted Mask 2, by contrast, feels completely unnecessary. While I could think of potential premises for a sequel if one HAS to exist, the idea Stine went with was pretty lackluster. I know that Goosebumps as a whole probably falls into Sturgeon’s Law as much as anything else, but this right here is just as good of an example of potential gone to waste.

Definitely check out the first book. The second book, meanwhile, is better left forgotten.