Goosebumps #57:
My Best Friend is Invisible
© 1997 by Parachute Press. Cover Art by Tim Jacobus.
Spoiler-Free Review
My Best Friend is Invisible was not a fun read. I found it tedious to get through. It felt rushed from the beginning. The twist at the end could have been fun for a short story, but the way they withheld important information until the end made it feel cheap. It reminded me of You Can’t Scare Me, which is not a compliment. On top of that I found every character extremely annoying. Maybe I was in a bad mood while reading it. The book was like a smattering of ideas that didn’t quite fit together. It felt like a rough draft written on a deadline. It makes me want to put about the same amount of effort into this review.
Score: 1.5
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ERMAHGERD #57: My Best Friend is Invisible.
© 2024 by Daniel Stalter. All rights reserved.
Photo and editing by Daniel Stalter.
Observations & Spoilers
I’m going to keep this review brief. If you want all of my usual details, you’re going to have to read it yourself, which I do not recommend.
My Best Friend is Invisible opens with Sammy, a normal kid with two scientist parents and an annoying little brother. His brother always impresses his parents by being good at science. Sammy also has a really obnoxious best friend who is obsessed with catching ghosts for some reason. Roxanne is absolutely convinced based on zero evidence that they are going to discover a ghost in the old Hedge House for their school project and become famous as a result. Then Brent the invisible kid shows up out of nowhere.
Brent introduces himself by messing up Sammy’s math problems, trashing his bedroom, and scaring his cat. He eventually talks to Sammy. He doesn’t explain why he’s invisible, but he does like to eat a lot and he wants to be friends with Sammy. Sammy wants to introduce him to Roxanne but Brent just goes quiet whenever Sammy tries to inform anyone that he has an invisible friend. He starts getting made fun of at school for it. Brent tries to pick him up to help him win a race but ends up falling and losing it for him. Then Sammy and Roxanne go to Hedge House for their ghost report.
At Hedge House, both Sammy and Roxanne are attacked and nearly killed by a ghost. It turned out to be Brent trying to help Sammy again. Sammy has finally had enough. He realizes that Sammy doesn’t like it hot, so he runs the shower extra hot so it steams things up and refuses to open the window. Brent complains. Finally Sammy’s parents get their “particle light spectrometer” device that they’ve been tinkering with since the early chapters, and it allows them to finally see Brent for what he really is: a disgusting human.
It turns out that Sammy and his family, and everyone except Brent, are aliens with tentacles who have presumably taken over Earth. Brent was made invisible by his own parents so that he wouldn’t attract attention, which is very logical if you’re not into making sense. He was just an invisible boy surrounded by aliens who wanted a friend. Sammy’s parents announce that Brent should be brought to the zoo since he is part of an endangered species. And that’s how it ends.
I really hate a twist that relies on withholding something as huge as all of the characters being tentacled aliens. That’s not really a twist so much as an outright lie. It could have worked really well as a short story, but a book with 100+ pages was far too long for this premise. The far more interesting book would have been from Brent’s perspective, but I think it would have been too far outside the mold of a Goosebumps book to work. These books almost exclusively start out with normal kids being taken out of their normal world. Starting with an invisible boy surrounded by aliens would have been a tough sell, but it would have been a better book.
Brent did a terrible job at being an invisible friend and evading detection. That’s a solid zero for social and survival skills. They hauled him off to the zoo at the end, which was pretty funny, but I was too annoyed by how they set up the twist to appreciate it. One minor detail I did appreciate about this book, though, is how Sammy’s cat is totally cool with tentacled alien overlords but draws the line at invisible humans. This strikes me as very cat-like behavior.
Only five books left!
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
This was more like a random collection ideas mashed together into a semi-coherent mess. It had a few fun ideas but was ultimately pretty boring.
Execution: 0
The twist at the end would have been better suited to a short story. It also relied on a lie by omission, which is so lazy.
Character: 0
Everyone was irritating to varying degrees. Sam, Roxanne, Brent, the parents. No one’s motivations made any sense.
Intent: .5
This book being a mess of different ideas, it’s hard to know what its intent was. It was a mess in terms of tone, wasn’t scary, and was quite boring without the twist at the end.
Originality: .5
I guess the twist at the end was fun and might have worked if it had been executed better, but all of it really just felt like a mash-up of things we’ve seen before.
Based on GoodReads aggregate ratings, My Best Friend is Invisible is:
Ranked 29th 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.
“My Best Friend is Invisible” is Episode 3×02.
• My guess is they will abandon the twist for this.
• It was smart to bring Hedge House into the beginning so it didn’t feel like a weird side plot.
• Roxanne is just as insufferable to start out. I can see why Brent wouldn’t want to be her friend.
• That clown face CGI was rough.
• Way creepier beginning. Definitely leaning into the ghost angle.
• A ghost who wants a friend is a way better story idea.
• OK, maybe Brent is something other than a ghost.
• I like how they leaned into Roxanne being obnoxious in this.
• They kept the twist after all. Now why do the aliens who took over earth look like humans?
• The face in the back of the head thing was weird and funny.
• Overall, a big improvement on the book, which isn’t saying much on its own.
Don’t miss the next post in my Goosebumps blog series:
Goosebumps #58: Deep Trouble II
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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