This Goosebumps entry takes a somewhat unique idea and proceeds to make me ask why would you write it like this? I didn’t remember this one at all and after reading it, I think I’ve already forgotten half of it. Since this book is all about bees: What is this? Oh no, not the bee book, not the bee book! It’s in my eyes! Aaaaah!

Synopsis:

The book starts with a warning; it contains lots of bees. This seems pretty obvious, but, okay.

Gary, the main character is afraid of bees. He’s also afraid of almost everything. So, instead of you can’t scare me, Gary would say, you can scare me. Quite the opposite of Courtney.

Outside of being scared of everything, Gary suffers from low self-esteem, general disdain of himself and others, and is probably the first Goosebumps protagonist who comes off as just an all-around negative person.

Gary is outside reading, thinking about how scared he is of bees. His neighbor, Mr. Andretti owns bees. For some reason, Gary likes to watch Andretti work with bees. Andretti thinks the FBI is hiring kids to spy on him. This is some crazy paranoid behavior, I think Andretti may want to see a psychiatrist, or at least a therapist.

Gary is then attacked by the cat known as Claus who latches onto him and scratches him. Everyone else likes the cat, except Gary.

Andretti sees Gary and jump scares him with bees, Gary runs away. Gary gets in his house and starts to help his mother with cooking, however when she makes him lunch, she’s out of jam for the bread, she only has honey. This causes Gary to freak out, since he’s scared of honey. This has got to be the lamest thing ever.

Later, Gary goes to play baseball with the other kids. However, none of the kids want him to play, since he sucks at baseball. We see this firsthand, since Gary can’t catch or hit a ball. Maybe, another sport would be better.

After baseball, Gary gets jumped by bullies. Gary gets absolutely massacred resulting in him having bruises, cuts, a torn shirt, and a bloodied face, great. My suggestion for Gary, if you can’t win, at least fight back, or try to do something, instead Gary just takes a brutal assault.

At home, Gary cleans up and puts on a long sleeve shirt while avoiding his family. He later goes biking. He sees two girls his age and decides to show off on his new bike. Gary proceeds to get his shoelace stuck in the chain of the bike, almost get hit by a car, and then run into a lamppost. All of this was avoidable, but R. L. Stine really wants to highlight how bad Gary is at everything.

Gary realizes his bike is absolutely destroyed, and he’s covered in even more cuts from the accident. How fast was he going?

After this, Gary plays on his computer, one of the few things he’s good at. Maybe, Gary should just become a pro gamer. He gets an ad for Person-To-Person Vacations on his computer. Gary thinks this is great.

When Gary comes down the stairs after playing computer games he gets a lecture from his mom about fighting, unfortunately, Gary is unable to fight. He then explains he wasn’t fighting but wrecked his bike. Gary gets another lecture from his parents on being safe while biking.

That night, he gets jump scared by a fake rat, it was prank by his sister, who doesn’t matter in this story.

Gary is sick of his life and goes to Person-To-Person Vacations. Ms. Karmen who runs the business says he would be body swapping with someone else. He can also switch with boys or girls his own age, cool!

Gary decides he isn’t ready yet but gives his information to Karmen. He goes home; however, he runs into the bullies again and is beaten for five minutes. I think with that much time Gary would be dead. Anyways, seems Gary will live for at least another few days as he walks away with more bruises and cuts.

Gary swears the next day he’s going to trade places with someone no matter what. I feel like this would end up being something along the lines of Get Out or Freaky in real life, but luckily, this book has an even dumber twist ready.

Before we can get to that, Gary doesn’t go back for a few days, so maybe he likes to get beat up.

Gary sees Andretti and gets chased by bees. He thinks to call the police, what are the police going to do?

A match has finally been found with Karmen telling him to get to the office when he can. Gary hurries to the building. He finds out he has been matched with Dirk, a super fit and handsome guy. Gary is excited, but wonders why Dirk would want to swap with him.

Dirk wants to swap because he thinks with Gary’s brain, he can be good at math. This makes no sense, since it’s a literal mind swap, also since Dirk isn’t there, they’re going to do a ranged swap.

As Gary is swapped, he notices a bee in the room with him and Karmen. This leads to the dumbest possible result; Gary becomes a bee. Great, this is like a worse version of the Fly.

This is when I tuned out for the majority of the book. Nobody can hear bee Gary. Karmen swats at him, but he escapes. He tries to fly after Karmen, but she drives away.

Gary goes home, but nobody can hear him. He sees Dirk in his body who seems to be getting along with his family, already.

Gary is attacked by the cat, but escapes.

He later gets captured by Andretti. Gary is forced to join the bee colony. Luckily, he has food from the honey.

In the morning, he escapes from the other bees, but Mr. Andretti sees the single bee as sick and tries to kill Gary. Gary escapes. Yeah, if I see a bee by itself, I also try to kill it, I actually don’t, but that’s Andretti’s logic.

He then goes to his house. Gary is an idiot and tries to talk to his sister Krissy as a bee. Krissy tries to kill him with a fly swatter. He escapes.

Gary is inside the house and gets to his room. He tries to write a message on the computer, but when Dirk wakes up, he doesn’t see the message, and thinks he left the computer on.

Gary watches as Dirk skateboards really well and has become popular in his body. Somehow this happened in a single day. Also, shouldn’t this help to prove my theory, since if Dirk had kept Gary’s mind, shouldn’t he suck at skateboarding now, so I wonder how his plan to get good at math is going.

Also, in Gary’s body, Dirk is now able to beat up the bullies. It seems like Gary may just have some skill issues.

Gary goes to find Karmen. Karmen still can’t hear him, and Gary finds she is still body swapping. This also brings up the question, how much does this cost? Also, did she not charge Gary, so is she just super in debt?

Gary finds a microphone and speaks into it. Somehow, Karmen is able to hear him now. Karmen doesn’t believe him at first but then realizes he must be telling the truth.

Somehow, Karmen didn’t find it weird that after the swap Dirk’s body was acting like a bee. But now she understands, great, she’s also dumb.

She tells Gary there’s one problem; Dirk is refusing to give up your body and wants to be you forever. The original contract was for one week. Gary doesn’t want to be a bee forever. I have a solution, just take Dirk’s old body, but nobody thinks of this, this is so dumb.

Karmen says he will remain a bee forever, unless Dirk gives up his new body. This still doesn’t make sense, just take Dirk’s old body. I mean, even if he lives on the other side of the country, it shouldn’t be hard to do this.

Somehow, since Gary is lucky, he’s able to find where bee Dirk lives and finds bee Dirk, only a few miles away. What? Why didn’t Dirk just come into the business himself, also, how? Don’t you have to be hooked up to a machine, so does Dirk just have his own machine at home? Huh? This makes no sense.

Also, the next part also makes no sense, as Gary still doesn’t think to do a swap with bee Dirk and Gary just leaves. This dude must be the dumbest character yet. All critical thinking has left. This book is ridiculous.

Gary gets home to find Dirk hanging out in his body. He tries to talk to Dirk, who just flicks him away.

In another dumb moment, Dirk says he’s able to understand and hear Gary and says he likes his body, so he’s not changing with him. Makes no sense, even with an explanation of bee DNA now being in Dirk’s new body. Huh???

Gary then gets dragged away by bees. Huh? Why does this happen? It’s never explained.

Gary escapes and leads the bee army to attack Dirk. Dirk is inside now, but Gary is an absolute genius and finds a way in. He stings Dirk. This is so dumb; Gary knows bees die after stinging but does it anyways.

Gary dies, the end.

I kid, I kid. This is a Goosebumps book, of course this is right when Gary swaps back to his old body. How? Why? Huh?

This is never explained but just happens. Gary wakes up in his own body.

There’s still a swarm of bees in the house, so this must have just happened. His Dad says to go get Andretti, but Gary just casually throws some honey outside, which the bees follow and leave the house.

Gary isn’t afraid of bees anymore. Even though, two pages ago he was still afraid of bees.

Months pass. He eventually meets Dirk as Dirk, who apologizes. Gary is also now a good skateboarder, sure thing, that’s real believable. Also, he eats pollen now and likes to lick flowers. I don’t know, this sucks. Book ends.

Review:

This book sucks.

The problems with this book exceed just about every other book in the Goosebumps series.

First, the main character sucks, the side characters suck, everyone makes dumb decisions, there are a ton of plot holes, almost nothing makes sense after the body swap, and there just isn’t much good to say about the book.

The only good aspects are the story could have been more interesting and at least had some level of intrigue, the concept of body swapping can be done well, but wasn’t, the book had stakes, and the book wasn’t boring.

Gary just sucks as a main character and there were so many plot contrivances and weak aspects to the story, that I don’t have much good to say about this book.

This is the weakest Goosebumps book I’ve read yet. No wonder nobody talks about this entry.

My rating for this Goosebumps entry is a 2/10. This book was a bee to read, luckily skimming some of the bee portions made it go by a bit faster.

Twist ending:

Gary eats pollen.

Memorable line:

“My bees trust me.” I don’t think that makes sense. Bees can’t trust people.

Memorable moment, cliffhanger, etc:

I turned myself into bee! Boom! Big reveal: I’m a bee. This is basically what happened, and honestly, almost nothing about this book is memorable, especially for any good reasons.

Bad parenting:

Stop fighting those other boys, even though it’s clear your being bullied, the most we’ll do is threaten to call their parents. Great, that really solved that problem.

Random References:

Baseball and Star Trek. I’d rather watch the Star Trek episodes Turnabout Intruder or The Crossing. Original series and Enterprise respectively.

Tropes in book:

Sibling pair, character is 12, nobody believes a character’s crazy story, crazy cliffhanger, Andretti jump scare, pranks, and bee abuse.

TV tie-in:

If you read this far, there is no TV tie-in for this Goosebumps entry. I couldn’t imagine this ever getting one. The first problem is the Canadian Goosebumps show budget probably couldn’t afford a green screened Gary as a bee for a whole episode, plus production costs would be too high, and it would look awful.

Next, this book sucks, no way they’re going to adapt such a garbage entry.

My rating for this Goosebumps episode is a 0/10. It doesn’t exist.

Come back soon for more Goosebumps fun and reviews.

To read the last Goosebumps review: https://goosebumpsblogger.com/goosebumps-16-one-day-at-horrorland/

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