The Give-Yourself Goosebumps series got me into reading novels back in 7th grade and I have been an avid reader ever since.
Thanks a lot R.L. Stine ( )

Dopo 13 anni posso dire che questo libro mi è piaciuto tantissimo! Uno dei miei preferiti nella collana dei Piccoli Brividi ♥ ( )

#43 "He's a real animal!"
Wanna play a game? Ginger and her twin brothers are lost in a part of the woods that is very strange. They're on a camping trip and cannot find their parents. But what they do find are beasts! Beasts who can talk. And they want to play a game... a game of survival! ( )

In truth this book doesn't really deserve the rating I gave it. It is a mess of a book, subject to change at the author's whim in order to create the most bizarre game possible. None of it follows any real discernible rules and it just... I don't even know. Nevertheless, as a kid I delighted in the images and the idea of a game being played on such a large scale as an entire forest. So, nostalgia is one of those stars, my friends.

[b: The East From the East|1109858|East Lynne |Mrs. Henry Wood|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1181076317s/1109858.jpg|1096822] is a mess. Kids get lost in a forest and tagged by a massive, poorly described blue creature who proclaims that they are now The Beast From the East. It's their job to tag someone else before the sun sets behind the Gulla Walla tree, otherwise they will be eaten. This raises some questions. When playing the game themselves do they eat one of their own kind? How do you keep playing a game when the players consistently get eaten? And... why? None of that is adequately answered.

( )

## He's a real animal!

This series had been feeling dog-tired in the five entries preceding the Beast from the East, and that sense wasn't shaken here. The worst of the first 43 books, Beast... is a boring story written by a very bored writer.

[N.B. This review includes images, and was formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

R.L. Stine's stories often start from the title, and build from there into creative, funny, spooky stories. The Beast from the East isn't one of those. Ginger and her twin brothers, Pat and Nat, are going on a camping trip with their parents. Barely settling into their campsite, the kids get lost and get dragged into a deadly game of tag being played by a species of blue-furred, English-speaking monsters. The game is, of course, called the Beast from the East, a name that alludes only to how arbitrary the game's logic and rules are: Whoever's 'it' in is the Beast of the title, and they must either escape or tag another player before sundown, or face being eaten by the winners.

But the tag only counts if no one's paused the game without notice, and if they sneak up and tag the player from the east. Add to that, hiding spots that only work once per game, penalty rocks that randomly explode if touched, brown splotches of grass in the forest that are instant-win zones for hungry monsters, special clone rules (for the twins!), and so on.

The siblings spend the entire book hurtling through a game of cat and mouse, with new rules popping up in each chapter. It's all too random and frantic. There's no time for developing the characters, either, as they're too busy running or hiding.

Usually the stinkers in this series are still pretty fun to read and reminisce with, but this one has nothing going for it. Yuck.

R.L. Stine's Goosebumps (1992–1997):
#42 Egg Monsters from Mars | #44 Say Cheese and Die-Again! ( )