Goosebumps #62:
Monster Blood IV
© 1997 by Parachute Press. Cover Art by Tim Jacobus.
Sequel to: Monster Blood,
Monster Blood II & Monster Blood III
Spoiler-Free Review
Monster Blood IV surpassed my expectations. I thought it was going to be terrible, but it turned out to be something slightly better. In fact, I will argue that it was the best Monster Blood book of the series, if only because the other three were the absolute worst. The blue slime creatures were fun, and I enjoyed the way that they behaved and evolved. I also liked how Kermit’s mom put hot sauce on everything. The previous Monster Blood entries revolved around the ideas that slime is scary and so are things that grow big. This one thankfully divorced itself of those ideas, so much so that I think it would have been better off being a standalone book. This is especially true when you factor in that Evan, Andy, Conan, and Kermit were not especially compelling characters. Their repeated run-ins with the substance known as “Monster Blood” made them come across as stupid, annoying, and incapable of learning from their mistakes. The first forty pages of this book were tedious as a result. It made me wish that the Monster Blood books had gone the way of the Night of the Living Dummy sequels and featured a different set of characters in each book. I think we all would have benefitted from it, but it’s difficult to say by how much. The green slime may have led to some iconic book covers and strong sales, but I am not sure that any Monster Blood book could have overcome its threadbare premise.
Score: 2
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ERMAHGERD #62: Monster Blood IV
© 2024 by Daniel Stalter. All rights reserved.
Photo and editing by Daniel Stalter.
Observations & Spoilers
The entire first third of Monster Blood IV focuses on Evan getting beat up by Conan, getting blamed for fighting by his aunt, being setup to squirm in weird experiments by his cousin Kermit, and finding the tiniest bit of solace in his friendship with Alex. Conan’s singular obsession with bullying Evan has some serious queer undertones. I’m sure he’ll be hitting Evan up on grindr in a decade or two. Evan will be a disaster gay at that point so it’s anyone’s guess how he would respond to that solicitation. My biggest problem with Evan is that he has no discernable character traits outside of being a perpetual victim and being obsessed with Monster Blood.
Evan is staying with his cousin Kermit while his parents are away, but at least he is getting paid to babysit the annoying little dude. There’s a whole bit in the beginning where Kermit has an invisible electric fence for his pet mice that completely ignores how invisible electric fences work. This fence is used multiple times throughout the book. In reality, you would need to be wearing the right collar for the fence to affect you, but Kermit’s version will just electrocute anyone who crosses it. Fuck science, this is a Monster Blood book and logic is not welcome here. Anyway, after Conan’s relentless bullying, Andy stops by Even and Kermit’s window at midnight with a new canister of Monster Blood she just happened to find in a parking lot.
To his credit, Evan is adamant that they can’t use the stuff on Conan no matter how much he deserves it. They argue about it, then Kermit opens the can before they can stop him. This time the slime is blue instead of green! What a twist. Conan randomly stops by (because he’s obsessed with Evan). He demands to see the blue slime but Kermit or Evan convinces him that it’s candy. He tries to snatch it but the electric fence stops him, but he vows to be back. Then the slime slides out of the can and turns into a little blue slug. The slug is cute and friendly, it even purrs when Andy picks it up. Then it makes for the garden hose and starts chugging water until it pops like a balloon and forms a second purple slug.
Now I have to hand it to Stine for the details of these slug creatures. They literally reproduce by exploding. I really do think the idea of these slugs could have worked well in a different setting with different characters. The situation quickly grows out of hand as the slut monsters multiply and destroy Aunt Dee’s flower garden (I think that was the aunt’s name but I’m not gonna look it up). They eventually round up the slugs into garbage bags and Kermit hides them in the basement. Aunt Dee is super mad about her flower beds but the kids go back to sleep and decide to deal with the issue in the morning.
They wake up and find that the monsters were in the basement bathroom, and therefore had endless access to water. They’ve spent the whole night multiplying. To make matters funnier, they also consumed Kermit’s hair-growth potion he had stashed in there. So now they are slimy and have hair. I can relate, girl. The monsters escape into the backyard. Aunt Dee manages not to notice while she makes her hot sauce pasta. The kids try feeding the hot sauce to the monsters but it just seems to make them meaner. A bunch of the monsters latch onto Dogface, Kermit’s dog. This leads to a mass exodus from the yard as the kids try to save Dogface from being drained of all his moisture.
Eventually the blobs get so aggressive they start fighting and eating each other. This is when the scientist who created them shows up. His name is Professor Eric Crane and he is an idiot, which is perfect for this little sub-franchise of Goosebumps books. It turns out the slug monsters where his attempt to create the perfect underwater fighting machines. He is sad that his creations have destroyed themselves, but when he leaves Dogface jumps on him. This causes a spill onto Conan’s yard. Evan, Kermit, and Andy decide to leave it and let Conan have his own little horror story.
Unfortunately for them, Conan is not only a weird closeted asshole, he’s also gross. You see, he remembered the blue candy that Kermit and Evan had the night before, and so when he finds some on his lawn he eats it. He tells the kids it tasted great, but he hasn’t been able to stop drinking water ever since. Now his yard is filled with his clones, and they look meaner than the original copy! And that’s how this little mess of a book ends.
All in all, Monster Blood IV was a net improvement considering its terrible predecessors. It’s the first book of the series to actually have a cohesive plot from start to finish, and didn’t just spin it’s wheels for 80 pages. I will always harbor a deep love for the terrible logic of the first Monster Blood villain Sarabeth, but I would take this book over that any day. It had its funny moments that almost made up for the tedious first act. I also think this one worked because it was the first Monster Blood book to have actual Monsters. If anything, this book is a better fit to the title than any of the others. It fell far short of being good, but it was at least the fun sort of bad. Sometimes that’s the best we can hope for.
With that, I am officially done with my Goosebumps reviews. I’m not saying that I will never read the Goosebumps 2000 or Goosebumps Horrorland books, but it won’t be anytime soon and I won’t be writing extensive reviews on any of them if I do. For my immediate future, I will continue my sporadic reviews of the Fear Street books when I have time, but mostly I am going to focus on my own writing. I have a comic book series I intend to finish, and some novels of my own that I want to write. This has been fun, but I look forward to never shaving my beard for the sake of a photo ever again. If you’ve stuck with me this entire time, or showed up late, I want to say thank you. It’s been a weird six years.
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 appreciated that this wasn’t a total repeat of the last few books, but it still wasn’t remarkable. So I give half a point for the exploding creatures.
Execution: .5
In a way, this was the most cohesive Monster Blood book, which isn’t saying much. The plotting was OK, but it relied on the characters being annoying and/or stupid. The whole thing was tedious with a few funny moments that made it more palatable.
Character: 0
Evan is not a good main character and he somehow managed to be the one Goosebumps character to come back for four books? Four books and he and Alex have learned nothing. Kermit and Conan were incredibly annoying. I did enjoy Aunt Dee’s hot sauce obsession, though.
Intent: .5
The little blob monsters were fun, especially when then grew hair and got mean. This had some good moments, and at least we weren’t just dealing with slime that grows big. If this weren’t a sequel to three books I hated, I probably still would have found it underwhelming in spite of those charms.
Originality: .5
I’ll give it half credit. The exploding monsters were a fresh take on a stale premise, even if all of the characters were still stuck in the previous books.
Based on GoodReads aggregate ratings, Monster Blood IV is:
Ranked 20th 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:
That’s it. I’m done.
But do be sure to check out the next from my Fear Street blog series:
Fear Street Super Chiller #11: Silent Night 3
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