Goosebumps #56:
The Curse of Camp Cold Lake
© 1997 by Parachute Press. Cover Art by Tim Jacobus.
Spoiler-Free Review
I really wanted to love this book. I came so close to loving The Curse of Camp Cold Lake. It had all of my favorite elements. It had a great setup and premise. The pacing was fantastic. This was on track to becoming one of my all-time favorites before it got derailed by the twist ending. I really hated the twist ending. It wasn’t fun, it didn’t make sense, and it left an unfortunate mark on an otherwise solid read. I can’t go into too much detail, but this book had so much potential. It delivered some of the best horror Stine has written. There was some great atmosphere and character building. I was fully on board with Sarah’s messy adventures. I felt for her and was rooting for her even as she made some terrible decisions. I was genuinely on the edge of my seat trying to figure out how things would play out right until the last few pages. Typically I love an RL Stine twist at the end, but this one spoiled the best elements of the book. It was silly and uninspired in a way that really bummed me out. I’ll get over it though. The Curse of Camp Cold Lake may have fallen apart at the end, but it was a damn good book up until that point.
Score: 3.5
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ERMAHGERD #56: The Curse of Camp Cold Lake.
© 2024 by Daniel Stalter. All rights reserved.
Photo and editing by Daniel Stalter.
Stock photo by mimadeo; Standard Adobe Stock License.
Observations & Spoilers
The Curse of Camp Cold Lake opens with Sarah Mass being sent off to a summer water sports camp with her all-star athlete brother, Aaron. She’s not great at making friends, she doesn’t care about water sports, and she really didn’t want to spend her summer at Camp Cold Lake. It doesn’t help that her brother fits in right away, while Sarah gets off on the wrong foot with all three of her cabin mates. First, Sarah complains to a counselor that the other three girls chose the best bunks before she even got the cabin, which is a fair complaint but no one likes a narc. The other three girls had to pick different beds. Then Sarah accidentally reveals to everyone that Jan has asthma by knocking her bag over. Jan had wanted that kept secret. Finally, Briana and Meg were already besties from last summer and already have a clique. From this point, I was very much on board with Sarah’s predicament. I too would have hated this situation and would have been awkward as fuck stumbling through it.
Briana and Meg up the ante by scaring Sarah by the campfire that night and making her look silly. Then they drop a snake into her shirt. Sarah feels sufficiently humiliated, even though the snake turns out to be harmless. On her way back to the cabin, she stumbles upon some spiders and hatches a plan for revenge. She traps a few in the hollow part of her flashlight, then pours them into Briana and Meg’s beds back in the cabin. Both girls end up getting spider bites and have to go to the infirmary, and Jan takes her turn as the cabin narc and tells everyone that she saw Sarah do it. This makes things extra awkward the next morning when Jan and Sarah are the only two girls without buddies for canoeing. If you thought this might become a case of two outcasts becoming reluctant friends, you would be very wrong.
It turns out Jan is actually really mad at Sarah for exposing her asthma. Now she won’t be able to go on the 6-day canoeing expedition, and she blames Sarah. Jan tells Shara all of this once they are out on the water. She then jumps from the canoe, flipping it in the process, then swims back to shore and tells the councilors that Sarah flipped the canoe on purpose. Sarah is rightfully gobsmacked by this turn of events, and decides she needs a new plan. Like a girl after my angsty teenage heart, Sarah devises an excessively melodramatic plan. She is going to pretend to drown.
Sarah goes out swimming, violating the buddy system but promising the camp councilor that she will keep close to shore. Then she dives under and stays down for as long as she can manage, pushing her own limits. But no one comes to rescue her. She finally gives up and pushes to the surface, only to find that Camp Cold Lake is empty. Not only that, the trees are bare and it is snowing. Sarah hears someone singing and follows the sound until she finds a girl. It turns out the girl is named Della, and she has been waiting for Sarah.She really wants to be Sarah’s buddy. This is when Sarah notices the minor details like Della is actually floating and semi-transparent. Sarah gets scard and refuses Della’s offer to become buddies, then gets the fuck out of there. Then her vision goes black.
Sarah wakes up after being resuscitated by Liz, the camp councilor. It turns out she almost did drown, but Liz saved her. That night, her cabin mates apologize to her and her plan seems to be working. There is only one major problem: she keeps seeing Della, and no one else can. She sees Della in the mess hall, and sees her driving the motorboat instead of Liz. Liz is worried and makes Sarah talk to Reichard, the head councilor. Richard assures Sarah that no campers have ever drowned at Camp Cold Lake, but Sarah isn’t convinced. Things only continue to escalate, with Della almost running Sarah over with a motorboat while waterskiing. Sarah decides it’s time to get the fuck out of camp, find the nearest town, and call her parents to come pick her up. If that seems a bit dramatic here, I think it fits with the Sarah we have come to know. As she’s grabbing her things in the cabin she has a strange run in with Briana. Briana wishes Sarah luck on her escape from camp.
Sarah’s flight through the woods is thwarted by Della, who decides to finally give Sarah the backstory instead of just trying to murder her. Such a classic villain, info dumping her whole back story. It turns out that Della did not drown. She had hated camp just like Sarah and attempted to run away. It turned out that the woods around Camp Cold Lake are crawling with deadly snakes, and one of them is currently crawling up Sarah’s lake. This had been Della’s plan all along. Now Sarah will die from a snake bite and become Della’s buddy forever. But then Briana shows up and fucks up Della’s plans. Because apparently Della tried the same thing with her the previous summer. Brianna removes the snake from Sarah’s leg, and tells Della that she has lost. Della cries and disappears. When Sarah goes to hug Briana and thank her, her arms go right through because now Briana is suddenly a ghost in spite of getting spider bites several nights ago and being able to hold a fucking snake. That’s because Della had killed Briana the previous summer, but Briana still didn’t want to be her buddy. Brana holds up the snake and asks Sarah if she would like to be her forever buddy.
I hated this ending. It was so good and had so much potential before the snake bites and Briana turned out to also be a ghost. Sarah’s experience of the empty camp when she almost drowned was super creepy and implied something really sinister happening at Camp Cold Lake. The fake drowning was one of the darkest moments I can recall in a Goosebumps book. Della genuinely made my skin crawl; there must be nothing worse than an annoying and needy ghost. This ending was such a bummer after all of that build up. It’s almost more frustrating than a book being objectively terrible all around. I wanted real curse, but instead we got this who’s who of ghosts who dies by snake bites. I love a good Stine twist, but this one came at the expense of the books best parts. I wish the entire final scene had been something different.
OK, six more books to go after this one. I’m almost there.
Score Card
For the scoring of each book, I decided to rate them based on five criteria worth 1 points each.
I then add that up to give it a rating out of 5 stars. Those criteria are:
Concept: the strength of the overall idea
Execution: the mechanics of storytelling
Character: the protagonists, antagonists, and villains
Intent: does it succeed in being the kind of book it wants to be?
Originality: subversion and reliance on genre tropes
Concept: .5
It was almost a great concept. It was almost a perfect score. But the ending relies on us believing that Briana was a ghost the whole time, which does not add up.
Execution: 1
Full credit here. The build up was fantastic. The pacing was excellent, and the drama was elevated consistently throughout. I just hated how he chose to end it.
Character: 1
The characters were done really well, from the angsty protagonist, to the mean bunk mates, to the creepy ghost girl. This was one of the better examples of Stine doing characters well.
Intent: .5
This had a great use of real scares. Della was also creepy in a fun way. The gotcha ending cheapened the experience for me.
Originality: .5
Having a fake drowning go wrong stands out as uniquely dark among this series, as so was the “upside down” version of the camp. The snake bite twist ending cheapened the original aspects this book had going for it.
Based on GoodReads aggregate ratings, The Curse of Camp Cold Lake is:
Ranked 7th of 62 books in the original Goosebumps series.
TV Adaptation – Bullet Review
For every book that was adapted for the Goosebumps TV series, I will watch and do a bullet review.
“There is no TV Episode for this book.
Don’t miss the next post in my Goosebumps blog series:
Goosebumps #57: My Best Friend is Invisible
Also, be sure to check out the latest from my Fear Street blog series:
Fear Street #3: The Overnight
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