reading: Creepover #9: No Trick-or_Treating!

In an effort to balance the huge collection of Goosebumps I've somehow amassed, I started buying the Creepover series a while back. I figured my daughter might eventually grow into them, and I'm trying to put together a bookcase of "junk food books" to balance out the Good Books we also buy them.

You know what they say: bad books make good readers.*

But of course that means I've been reading them myself. They're pretty cute: gorgeous covers, slightly more conversation-and-character development than an R.L.Stine, and a persistent theme of "sleepovers" (also echoed in the house pseudonym, P.J.Night).

They mostly toy with scariness rather than becoming flat-out terrifying, but each achieves a few genuinely creepy moments. Right now I'm reading #9, No Trick-or-Treating!, which as a "superscary superspecial" is just a tad longer than the first eight. That gives it an edge, because it can develop the setting a bit more thoroughly (a small country town which mysteriously doesn't celebrate Halloween) and let events unfold slowly enough to build up some real tension.

I'm a fully-functional adult (more or less), and I had to resist the temptation to peek at the last chapter to find out what happens. Ha. I would have loved these SO MUCH when I was the right age. I'm enjoying them enormously even now.