This entry brings back time travel, but even more than the last Goosebumps entry. Having two books in a row that uses the same plotline leads to some comparisons; however, I’ll look at this book as it’s intended: a standalone story. This is an entry I remember growing up fairly well, so It’ll be interesting to see how well it holds up. In this entry, I’ll see if the cuckoo clock really leads to doom.

Synopsis:

Michael is always being pranked by his sister, Tara. Wait, I need to take that back. Michael is always being emotionally, physically, and mentally abused by his sister. While this may seem like an overstatement, this is not the case. If you thought Manny from the Diary of the Wimpy Kid books was a soulless monster, you have not met Tara.

I’m going to double down on this. You may know Ivan the Terrible, this book has an even worse human, Tara the Terrible.

While outside, Tara tries to convince Michael that his shoes are untied. In the past, if he looked down, she would punch him in the face. So, Michael doesn’t, and he steps in her gum. Michael chases after her, and Tara hides behind their mom. He then gets in trouble with his mom. His mom also doesn’t believe him. Wow, she must think Michael purposefully tracked gum into the house and is being mean to his sister. Which the book confirms.

Michael explains how he gets blamed for everything. Which by the end of this book is true 99% of the time, whether it was him or not.

Later that day, a cuckoo clock gets delivered to their home. His dad H. H. Holmes has bought a clock from the antique shop. If you think I’m joking about Michael’s dad being a serial killer, I am not. His name is almost identical being Herman Webster, and on top of that, he did create the monster known as Tara.

Michael’s dad has been trying to buy this clock for years from the antique shop. However, the owner’s price had always been too steep. After years of negotiations, the owner noticed an error on the clock and sold it at a reduced price. His dad talks about the magic of the clock and that the owner tried to convince him not to buy the clock due to the error. If I heard that, in a Goosebumps book, I’d make sure to avoid that clock.

The clock also only goes to the year 2000 on its dial. I think whoever made this clock thought Y2K was real and that it would be the end of the world. Either that or the creator was preparing the 2001 onward model, so that you would have to buy another clock.

Michael is then jump scared by the cuckoo clock with the bird popping out of it when the hour shifts over. Tara then makes fun of Michael. Michael tries to talk back, but his mom gets mad at him.

Before dinner, Tara stomps on Michael’s foot, because she can. Michael then gets in trouble for yelling in pain. His parents don’t believe Tara did it. Wow, these parents are enablers and blind. Maybe, they hate Michael and just allow Tara to bully him.

During dinner, their dad tells them to “Stay out of the den!” Oh, no, we’ve lost plant dad and have gained clock dad. However, Michael needs encyclopedias to study, so he’s allowed to be in the den. Tara lies and says she also needs the encyclopedias, so she will be with Michael in the den.

Before Michael starts studying, he’s looking at the clock. Tara sneaks up on him in her Halloween mask and costume. She scares Michael. Michael then gets in trouble for touching the clock, which Tara lies about. Also, the parents somehow don’t notice Tara’s Halloween costume when talking to them. These parents are either braindead or just hate Michael, since Tara is clearly lying about everything that’s going on.

Some time passes and Michael has his birthday. Friends from his school are coming over for it. His dad fixes the lock on his door, which is used to keep Tara out. If the parents installed a lock on his door to keep his sister out because she’s known to be awful, why are they always taking her side? This is so stupid. Also, Tara broke the last lock off the door to do something truly heinous. This will be shown later.

For his birthday, Michael is surprised with a new bike by his parents. It’s a new fancy bike and Michael is super excited. He wants to take it out for a ride. Before he can, Tara jumps on it and knocks it over. This causes the bike to get damaged and scratched up. Michael gets upset at Tara. However, his parents are more worried about Tara being okay, and then they get mad at Michael. Yeah, these are some of the worst parents in Goosebumps so far.

Michael’s birthday party commences. Tara continues being awful by telling a girl Michael has a crush on her. Michael decides to be mature and leave to the garage with some other friends to show his bike. They question Michael why his new bike is all beat up. When Michael comes back in, Tara has opened all of his presents and makes fun of him more.

So, clearly the parents have no control over their daughter. This is literally like people who own an aggressive Chihuahua, “Oh look at my cute little baby, she’s so nice and precious,” while the dog is attacking everything in its vicinity, using its two brain cells to be the spawn of the beast, and causing major property damage despite its small size.

However, when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it does. Michael is carrying his birthday cake into dining room, when Tara grabs his ankle and trips him. He lands on the cake and everyone laughs at him. His parents then get mad at him and he’s in trouble again.

Throughout all of this his mom is constantly calling Michael a liar and fibber, while his dad either joins in with his mom or takes Tara side. Now, my advice to Michael would be to get a counselor, another adult, or at least other people involved in this case. Getting outside help could help to prevent future abuse and the lack of help or support from his parents point to this being a reoccurring issue in the future.

Luckily, it seems like Michael is a pretty good person and has a good nature about him, because if he decided to ever beat up, or start to actually fight back against Tara, things would probably not go so well for her. Anyways, what Tara is doing is abuse, and will likely have long term psychological impacts on Michael, which will also likely affect him for the rest of his life and impact many of his personal or professional relationships in the future.

I stated earlier that things were going to get worse, and you could argue this is one of two times things get much worse. First, Michael is preparing for a play. This takes place before his birthday. Michael invites over some girls from school to help him prepare for his role. They arrive and he is getting changed upstairs. Tara leads them up to his room and opens his door, since she broke the lock, and they see Michael in his underwear, unprepared. Yup, this isn’t great.

At school, on a different day, Tara steals a hat from one of Michael’s friends. She then plants the hat in Michael’s bag, and she tells the friend. Michael is then beaten by this friend until he’s bruised and bloodied. At home Michael gets in trouble, since they don’t believe Tara is behind it.

On top of this Tara tortures the family cat, by lifting its legs up and pulling them apart. She also smushes the cat’s face. Great, animal abuse. She then launches the cat at Michael. Michael gets scratched by the cat. His mom gets mad at him and blames him for the cat’s abuse. She also doesn’t believe Michael, again, like every other time.

I think Tara may become a serial killer or at least may have antisocial personality disorder. Now, it’s too early to say based off her age in the book. Also, considering kids generally suck, this isn’t exactly a complete indictment against her, but there are plenty of signs that this may become the case.

At home, Michael thinks about how Tara is often caught touching the clock. He decides to finally get back at her. He sneaks downstairs that night and twists the cuckoo’s head on the clock around when it pops out. Michael goes to sleep.

The next day he wakes up and it’s his birthday again. Here comes the time travel, which makes up most of the book. However, most of it is repetition from earlier in the book, so most of this I’ll move through pretty quickly.

He goes through his birthday again and the exact same things transpire, even though he tries to change the past and prevent the events that occur.

He goes further back in time to preparing for the play and to Tara planting the hat on him. These events both take place again, despite Michael’s best efforts.

Michael eventually tries to tell his parents, but they don’t believe him. He thinks maybe they’re experiencing the same things, but they aren’t, as to be expected. His family then makes fun of him, which is truly the most Webster family thing of all time.

Michael goes back to the third grade the next day. He goes to the sixth-grade class because he hasn’t realized he’s in the third grade. After the easiest day of school ever, Michael goes home. At home Tara pulls his hair and beats him up. He gets in trouble for pushing Tara to get her off of him. His parents don’t believe him, and he gets in trouble for pushing Tara.

The next day, Michael is in the second grade. He sees Tara before going to school. She asks for a kiss and when Michael goes to kiss her, she jabs her finger into his eye. I guess Michael never really stood a chance at any point.

After school, Michael decides to get on a bus and go to the antique shop to try to go forward. I can’t believe Michael hasn’t tried to do this sooner, but okay.

After getting off the bus, the store is closed. He goes to a nearby construction site, grabs a brick, and plans to break into the store to change the clock. However, his dad shows up and Michael is unable to finish his plan.

The next day, he is now very young and has to go to nursery school. He is so young in fact; Tara is no longer around. And luckily for us readers, she doesn’t show up for the rest of the book. Thank you, Stine!

At the nursery Michael is bullied by his future friends. This eventually results in him climbing a tree and breaking his arm. Good for Michael, the next day he’s going to be even younger.

The next day he’s a baby. Baby stuff occurs, which may be the most horrifying part of this book. Anything you can think of a baby experiencing that would be awful to experience with a 12-year-old brain, it happens.

He goes with his mom to meet his dad at work. His dad thinks Michael is slow, since he’s not as smart as some of the other babies or toddlers. Wow, his parents literally didn’t think much of him since he was born. They then head to the antique store. At the store, his mom let’s him out of the stroller to stumble around.

Michael is able to find the clock. He becomes a baby genius and uses a nearby chair to get up to the bird. Once up there, he is able to change the head and the year forward before his mom grabs him.

Michael goes forward in time until it’s his birthday. He asks about Tara when he sees the new bike, but there is no Tara. His birthday goes off perfectly and Michael is finally happy.

Time progresses forward and his dad buys the clock. When Michael investigates the clock, he notices the year 1988 is missing, which is the year Tara is born. Michael considers using the clock to bring Tara back. No, don’t like that. Just Don’t. Don’t ever do that for any reason ever, don’t. If he does, he’ll forever have worse plans than even Michael Scott. The book ends.

Review:

This Goosebumps entry is another that is competently written. Two books in a row have been really good. This book wasn’t exactly enjoyable to read, but it was good. A book doesn’t have to be enjoyable to be good, and this is one of those cases.

The reasons I didn’t find this book to be my cup of tea is mainly related to Tara and to a lesser degree the time travel. While I usually don’t include personal gripes in my reviews, this is a bit of an exception. I think Tara is pretty awful, if it wasn’t clear, and is a character I can’t stand. Which makes her a great villain, however, even though she’s important to the plot, she feels more like a plot device much of the time.

I’m also not the biggest fan of time travel in stories and find it rather boring or not explained well much of the time. Also, time travel often breaks its own rules or lead to nonsensical plots. In this case, it’s so vague and leads so many questions about exactly how it works in the story that it ends up feeling slightly weak. Like how does a whole year just not exist now, or at least for a single family? If you think about it too much, the story starts to have plot holes.

While I know this book isn’t often considered the child abuse simulator of the series, it does have abuse quite a bit in the story, which is never fun to read about. The craziest part, Stine based Tara on an actual child. To clarify, a child named Tara asked Stine to include her in one of his books and have her be a bad person in his story. I think Stine succeeded.

While most of my critiques come down to personal taste, I think some of the time travel elements are still too poorly executed for the most part. I also think that Tara is a bit too much, I think the repetition in the plot makes the book a bit boring at times, most of the characters are insufferable or paper thin, the plot is also pretty thin with a lot of plot conveniences used to get to the end, Michael waiting super long to do anything to go forward in time, and I just didn’t have the best time reading this one.

However, there is good. The story, at least at face value is really solid. The writing is mostly competent. The time travel and story make sense outside of a few details that don’t work. Tara is a great, very hate-able, and very well characterized villain for a Goosebumps book, and I’d even argue the parents work decently well as villains.

I’ll give this Goosebumps entry a 6/10. I think it works well overall, just the small issues and my personal dissatisfaction in the story puts it more towards the middle of what Goosebumps book can be.

Twist ending:

Tara no longer exists. Good riddance.

Memorable line:

“He’s always making things up and telling fibs.” Wow, this mom sucks.

Memorable moment, cliffhanger, etc:

Tara no longer exists. Best part of the whole book.

Bad parenting:

The whole book. There is constant bad parenting with no relent. If you want good parents, read another book.

Random references:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Donatello, Frog Prince, Smurfs, Duke Blue Devils, and Hulk. Hulk smash puny book!

Tropes in book:

Character is 12, sibling pair, no one believes a character’s crazy story, cuckoo jump scare, crazy cliffhangers, animal abuse, dark ending (for Tara only, otherwise bright ending), and pranks (if you count abuse as pranks).

TV tie-in:

The episode adaptation doesn’t do much in the way of improvements to the story.

There are some differences between the book and this Goosebumps episode. The story is much shorter with Michael going through fewer stages of ages. Tara turns into a green screened cuckoo, yes that’s not an error, she does, but only during a dream sequence. Michael gets anally probed, with a rectal thermometer, I never thought I would write these words for a Goosebumps episode review. An apparent child molester goes after Michael. Tara’s worst actions are removed. Tara’s also out of the story sooner, huge improvement.

The good parts of this Goosebumps episode are fewer parts with Tara than the book, almost no abuse, it works better being more condensed, and there’s less filler.

The bad include no fixes to the plot, some pretty bad acting, the time travel and issues with it are still present, bad effects, there’s a useless scene where a man touches and stalks Michael, and the parents remain the same. Also, the characters are even more flimsy in the Goosebumps episode adaptation.

I’ll give this Goosebumps episode adaptation a 4/10. Not the worst by any stretch, but the acting and some of the effects make this one not so great.

Memorable episode line:

“He’s a Krej.” Oh no, Tara has learned bad 90s slang, now she will be an even more effective bully.

Famous cast:

You really thought this episode would have famous cast members? Yeah, right.

Come back soon for more Goosebumps fun and reviews.

To read the last Goosebumps review: https://goosebumpsblogger.com/goosebumps-28-a-night-in-terror-tower/

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