Goosebumps #54:
Don’t Go to Sleep
© 1997 by Parachute Press. Cover Art by Tim Jacobus.
Spoiler-Free Review
Don’t Go to Sleep was a really fun read. It was a great balance of horror, adventure, and comedy. The premise was relatable, and it didn’t waste time with fake scares. I laughed out loud at several parts of it. I appreciated the trippier elements and reality distortion. The plot kept a steady pace while escalating the drama with each chapter. I’m always relieved when a Goosebumps book avoids some of Stine’s worst tendencies. I enjoyed the characters, although Lacie could have been fleshed out more. The science of it is wonky, but no one is reading Goosebumps books for plausibility. The twist at the end felt refreshing; it wasn’t so much a punchline as it was the perfect note to end on. Going into this last stretch of books, I had feared that there would be a decline in quality, but so far the 50s have been just as wildly inconsistent as the rest of the series. I haven’t done the math, but it feels like for every great Goosebumps book there is a bad one and a mediocre one. Those aren’t terrible odds. I got lucky this time because Don’t Go to Sleep ranks up there with the very best.
Score: 4.5
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ERMAHGERD #54: Don’t Go to Sleep.
© 2024 by Daniel Stalter. All rights reserved.
Photo and editing by Daniel Stalter.
Observations & Spoilers
Matt has a small room. His older siblings, Greg and Pam, each have normal sized bedrooms. They have a spare room which is much bigger than Matt’s room, but he is not allowed to take “in case they have guests.” This is some truly suburban nonsense logic, but it works really well in the context of this book. Matt’s mom is a single mom working two jobs, and is presumably very tired. This means Matt is left in the care of his older siblings who both think he’s a huge nerd. Frustrated, one night Matt decides to take matters into his own hands goes to sleep in the spare bedroom. When he wakes up the next morning, everything is different.
Matt finds that he is now the older sibling. Pam and Greg are in middle school and he’s in high school. He is immediately overwhelmed by the really difficult school work. He eventually panics and runs from school, where he bumps into a small girl. When he gets home, he falls back asleep in the spare room. When he wakes up this time, he is an only child, and his parents are two people he doesn’t recognize. They take him to a strange school he’s never been to. He sees the girl he bumped into, and they steal away in the school yard to talk. He finds out her name is Lacie, but they are interrupted by two men who start to chase him. He runs back home and falls asleep again.
This time he wakes up to find that he is in a circus family with tons of siblings, and he’s the star of their show. When they arrive at the circus, his father tries to force him into a cage with a lion. He tries to run away, but the same two guys from the last reality find him. He flees into the lion cage and the lion scares the men off. Afterwards, Matt’s unfamiliar family takes him home and he goes back to sleep. He wakes up as a monster covered in green scales that likes to eat metal and rubber. There is a fantastic scene of him ripping a windshield wiper off a car for a quick snack, then ripping off the door to munch on some metal. He then goes looking for Lacie, who he believes is the only person who can help him.
He finds Lacie, who leads him to a small house in the forest. Then she springs a trap on him with the two guys that were chasing him. He gets tangled in net and shoved into a dark room. When he wakes up, he is himself again, but trapped in a cage. Lacie explains to Matt that he has fallen into a reality hole. She and her assistants, Bruce and Wayne, are part of the Reality Police. He’s causing untold damaged to reality and they have been tasked with stopping him. Their solution is to make him drink a potion that will put him to sleep forever. Matt panics while they plot from the other room, then forces himself to fall asleep again. He wakes up as a squirrel and escapes the cage.
He runs back home with a new brilliant idea: he needs to go back to sleep in his original bedroom. It’s his last hope. He tries to sneak into his house, and almost gets to his bedroom, when his sister catches him. Pam stuffs him into a hamster cage and decides she will keep him as a pet. He manages to escape his would-be prison and falls asleep inside a tree. He wakes up as a much fatter version of himself and breaks the branch he was sleeping on. He knocks on the door of his family home, but his mother doesn’t recognize him. He spots Lacie with Bruce and Wayne coming down the street and ducks into some shrubs. He then hides out there until nightfall and sneaks into his old bedroom window and finally falls asleep in his old bed.
Everything is back to normal when he wakes up the next morning. He goes to school where they do seventh grade math that he actually understands. He doesn’t even mind the teasing from his siblings. Then he comes home to find that his Mom has taken the day off work to surprise him. She thought he made a good point the other night about how he should get the spare room, so it’s his now. She even took the liberty of moving all of his stuff into his new room for him. That was really sweet of her, don’t you think?
I loved that little twist at the end because Matt finally got what he wanted but it was no longer what he wanted. Goosebumps are known for their twist endings. They are rarely subtle like this one, but they are usually fun (Beast from the East), and they can occasionally be mean (Be Careful What You Wish For). Some are weird as fuck (Egg Monsters from Mars), some are incredibly dark (Cuckoo Clock of Doom) and some feel lazy and unimaginative (How I Got My Shrunken Head). When you pump out 62 of these books in a 5-year period, you aren’t going to knock it out of the park every time.
The TV episode (bullet recapped below) improved on the books weakest element by eliminating Lacie’s character. The only thing that could have made this better would be if the Reality Police had been better defined (and better at their jobs). Their purpose and history here was a little too vague and too convenient to the plot to feel like a fleshed out idea in its own right. This point did not bother me while I was reading it, so yes I really am nit picking. I’m happy to find that there are still some high-quality reads this late in the series. Don’t Go to Sleep was a pleasant surprise.
Score Card
For the scoring of each book, I decided to rate them based on five criteria worth 2 points each.
I then split that in two 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: 2/2
This was a lot of fun. No need to overthink the science of a Reality Warp. You’re here to have fun and this book delivers.
Execution: 2/2
Excellent use of leveling up as the situation got weirder. It never felt like it was spinning its wheels, and I thought the twist ending was one of Stine’s best.
Character: 1/2
This might be the weakest part of the book. Matt was a fine enough character, but Lacie and the Reality Police could have been much better developed. This almost feels nit-picky, because it really wasn’t that egregious.
Intent: 2/2
This book had a great blend of comedy, adventure, and terror. It was a scary concept and Stine had a lot of fun with it. No complaints here.
Originality: 2/2
This is easily the trippiest Goosebumps concept, and it’s a standout among its contemporaries
Based on GoodReads aggregate ratings, Don’t Go to Sleep is:
Ranked 30th 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.
“Don’t Go to Sleep” is Episode 3×4.
• They changed it from the large spare room to the attic, which takes some of the fun out of it. Who wants to go sleep in a dusty attic with a sleeping bag instead of their own very small bed? My allergies would like to register this as a false choice.
• “Reality? Who needs it! I hate reality!” —Matt, a twelve year old in the mid-nineties who has no idea how stupid reality is going to get in a few decades.
• I tried Shazamming the “that’s reality” rap song they featured but had no luck.
• Matt finding out he’s a 12 year old hockey star with an agent but can’t even skate is pretty funny and would be terrifying.
• They made Bruce and Wayne adults? I guess that kinda makes sense.
• LOL now he has to perform brain surgery on the president.
• It’s tradition for the bride to consume raw onions immediately before getting married.
• They eliminated Lacie completely. Which makes sense; she was the weakest element of the book.
• The sister being on the phone the whole time was a good touch.
• The book ending was better.
Don’t miss the next post in my Goosebumps blog series:
Goosebumps #55: The Blob That Ate Everyone
Also, be sure to check out the latest from my Fear Street blog series:
Fear Street #3: The Overnight
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