Goosebumps #61:
I Live In Your Basement
© 1997 by Parachute Press. Cover Art by Tim Jacobus.
Spoiler-Free Review
RL Stine wrote I Live in Your Basement while in his David Lynch era. That’s my theory at least. I mean it with both the pros and the cons that come with the comparison. On one hand, the book was delightfully weird at times and it kept me guessing. On the other hand… I’m still a bit confused about how it all fits together. There’s a twist at the end that “explains” all of the random idiosyncrasies of the book, but I don’t think it was successful. It relies really heavily on a pretty wild concept in order to work. I often use the term half-baked when criticizing these books, and I usually mean it in the negative. I don’t want to use that here. Maybe a more abt metaphor would be wine that needed some more to age. This book had the right ingredients, but it needed some more time for gestation. I also appreciate a book that takes big swings and misses over a book that plays it safe and succeeds. I Live in Your Basement was messy but ambitious, and I like that about it. Even with its faults, it managed to be interesting.
Score: 3.5
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ERMAHGERD #61: I Live In Your Basement
© 2024 by Daniel Stalter. All rights reserved.
Photo and editing by Daniel Stalter.
Stock photo by YesPhotographers; Standard Adobe Stock License.
Observations & Spoilers
I Live in Your Basement opens with Marco getting hit in the head with a baseball bat while playing with some friends. He wakes up on the couch in his living room with a throbbing head. His mother tells him they just got back from the hospital and he is to rest easy for the next few days. Marco’s mother had warned him not to play baseball with his friends or else he would get hurt. She never wants him to do anything for fear of him getting hurt. Now she gets to say “I told you so,” and that’s almost worse than the headaches. At least, that was the case until he got his first phone call from Kieth. Kieth informs Marco that he lives in the basement, and that Marco is going to take care of him now for the rest of his life. When Marco tries to tell his Mom, she points out that there is no phone in the room.
It goes on like this with Marco trying to get back to his regular life but Kieth keeps popping up. One day he shows up in Marco’s room unannounced. When Marco tries to show his mother, Kieth has disappeared. He tries to tell his friend Jeremy about Kieth as well, but he knows he just sounds crazy. When his mother grows concerned about him hearing voices, she takes him in to see Dr. Baily. There was a fun little scene with a girl in the waiting room who couldn’t stop hiccuping. Dr. Baily hears Marco out, and then says that they need to remove his brain so that they can put it under a microscope. Mom seems fine with this, but Marco is adamantly against it. He runs from the doctor’s office.
That night, Marco sees Kieth’s face on his computer screen. Then he’s paid a visit by Gwynnie, the girl who hit him in the head with the baseball bat by mistake. She wanted to apologizes and so she just randomly appeared in his bedroom. Marco tells her about Kieth and tries to show her the face on the computer screen, but she just points out that the computer isn’t even on. Then convinces her to check out the basement with him to search for Kieth. She goes along with it for a while, but she thinks he’s just trying to get one over on her. SHe then offers to show him something really scary and turns her face inside out.
Marco wakes up in the hospital. It turns out the book up until this point has been a fever dream. Gwynnie is really his sister, and Jeremy is the one who hit him with the bat. Dr. Bailey appears, and he is different from the Dr. Bailey who wanted to do a prompt brain removal. This Dr. Bailey pulls on Marco’s tongue until it unravels in a huge spool on the floor. Marco wakes up again where he is promptly met with a completely different Dr. Baily. This one give him an envelope with a note from Kieth. Marco tries to show his mother and sister the letter, but it disappears before he can. The Dr. Claims to have no memory of having given him the letter.
When Marco finally gets to go home the next day, he is confronted by Kieth in his bedroom. Kieth explains that he put himself into Marco’s dreams. That was just to get his attention; now he wants Marco to take care of him. Marco hits him in the head with a paperweight and Kieth melts into a weird yellow blob. The yellow blob slithers to Marco and the two have a huge fight, with Kieth the blob trying to suffocate Marco. They end up grappling on the kitchen floor when Marco’s mother walks in. She tells Marco to stop rolling around on the ground. The blob has disappeared. He goes back to his room where Kieth is waiting. Finally, he admits defeat. Kieth responds by opening his mouth and turning himself inside out.
Now it’s Kieth’s turn to wake up. He is with his mother. We come to understand that Kieth and his mother are monsters that live in Maco’s basement. Keith had been playing baseball with some humans against his mother’s wishes when he got hit in the head. His mother is very anxious about Marco and Gwynnie discovering the monsters that live in their basement. Keith decides to relax in the way that monsters do and begins turning himself inside out. He is interrupted when Marco walks into the basement and sees him. Trying to think fast, Keith tells Marco that he is only dreaming, but he doesn’t know if the lie will work. And that’s how it ends.
A round of applause is due for the ambition. This had some great weird and fun moments. The actions of the book all make a lot more sense when you apply dream logic. That being said, I have lots of unanswerable questions for how basement dwelling slugs live, dream, and operate. First, if Keith and his mother can make themselves look human (which is implied) then why do they live in the basement of another families house? It seems really inconvenient. Second, is it common for slug monsters to dream they are human? By being Marco in his dream, it seems to be implied that Kieth is horrified and disgusted by himself. I find that sad. He should love his inside out slug body.
The whole thing was a dream can be a really cheap twist, but I think it worked here because of the head injury angle. I don’t think the added twist of it being Keith made a ton of sense, though. A way better twist would have been (in my humble opinion) this: Kieth went to play baseball with the humans, Marco was there and saw him. Marco catches him later that afternoon in his basement turning inside out. Kieth panics and bops him on the head with a baseball bat. Marco emerges from this head injury fever dream to Keith and his mother arguing about what to do with him. I think that would have worked better than the whole think being Kieth’s dream. I guess I really wanted something better than the slug monster reveal at the end. Something more unsettling, like Lefty being trapped on the other side of the mirror in Let’s Get Invisible. The setup was perfect for something like that.
Oh well. On to the final book in the original series!
Score Card
For the scoring of each book, I decided to rate them based on five criteria worth 1 point 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
I won’t say it was half baked, but it was also not fully cooked. The right ingredients were all there, which counts for a lot.
Execution: .5
The whole book being a dream is a tough ending to sell; it makes the reader feel cheated.
Character: .5
The mom and doctor were fun dream logic turns out to be a great way to explain terrible parenting.
Intent: 1
The unreliable memory aspect was really fun and unsettling. It kept me guessing right up to the end, even if I wasn’t terribly fond of the ending.
Originality: 1
This was a weird one, so I’ll give it full credit for that.
Based on GoodReads aggregate ratings, I Live In Your Basement is:
Ranked 37th 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 #62: Monster Blood IV
Also, be sure to check out the latest from my Fear Street blog series:
Fear Street Super Chiller #10: Goodnight Kiss 2
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