Welcome to Camp Nightmare by R.L. Stine Series: Goosebumps #9
Published by Scholastic
Pages: 160
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Welcome to Camp Nightmare It's the little camp of horrors! Next summer you'll stay home ... if you survive! Billy thinks that life at camp is a bit creepy, but when other campers start to disappear and his parents do not answer his letters, Camp Nightmoon becomes Camp Nightmare.
Well this was definitely a marked improvement from The Girl Who Cried Monster.
Here we have the tale of Billy. Billy is on his way to his first summer camp, Camp Nightmoon. Y’know, yay camp… Never went to summer camp myself, England didn’t really have them. SO they always seem like such an awesome novelty to me. But at Camp Nightmoon all is not as it seems. From the start when the campers are attacked by unknown fuzzy carnivores, right through to the climax with rifles aimed at children, something is more than a little off about Billy’s experience at camp.
The twist explains it, but the lead to it is a brilliant piece of tension building. You expect to get a few jump scares, and they sort of happen, but for the most part the tension just builds and builds until the climax. But it does it in a way that doesn’t cause the reader to get so despondent that they can’t continue.
The pacing of the story moves along at a decent speed, propelling the reader through accident after accident. We see the campers being thinned out and whittled down until there is only Billy left in his bunk, and oddly it doesn’t seem forced or like a Deus Ex Machina, which is something a lot of adult horror can’t even get right.
Once again, I find myself applauding Stine and his writing for this book because if I hadn’t already known the twist, I don’t honestly think I would’ve guessed it.
I look forward to more like this.
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About Archer
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult, I will devour pretty much anything that can hold me. Outside of that I’m a professional woodworker, a serious gamer, and a keen cook.
