Have you ever heard of the saying, “Try, try again?” Well after two previous Goosebumps entries we have the third Monster Blood entry. I don’t want to be overly critical of these books, but honestly, the first two were subpar in my opinion. Now with the third entry I have my doubts if this one will be good. I’ll give it my best shot and try, try again.

Synopsis:

The book opens with Evan having a nightmare fake out about Monster Blood. This is how you know any peak content from the Monster Blood books is in the past. If you don’t believe me, just read this synopsis.

Evan Stupid as he has been nicknamed is awoken from a nap by his mom. He can’t get down the green Jell-O for breakfast, since he still has Monster Blood PTSD.

After breakfast he has to take care of his cousin, Kermit, not to be confused with Kermit the Frog. Evan has been forced into babysitting his younger cousin due to normal babysitters being too expensive. He’s being three dollars an hour and absolutely hates it. Which isn’t even minimum wage in 1995.

Evan absolutely hates Kermit. He describes his cousin as a genius, but also a liar and a snitch. Trust me, Kermit almost rivals Tara the terrible. Even describes how Kermit melted Evan’s shoes to the basement floor last time. Which Evan gets blamed for. Great.

Kermit may be younger than Evan, but not by the most significant amount and Kermit is in school. Also, everyone believes that Kermit is just a soft, innocent, genius of a child.

Evan arrives at Kermit’s house, but before he can go inside, Conan O’Brien shows up. Wait, I mean Conan the Barbarian. Actually, I mean Conan the bully from the last book. Conan starts to bully Evan. Evan describes him as the meanest kid in Atlanta. That’s a pretty high bar to clear for anywhere, so good job Conan.

As Evan is being bullied, Kermit shows up with a glass beaker of blue liquid. Kermit says it’s an invisibility formula and threatens to throw it on Conan. Conan doesn’t believe him, so Kermit throws the liquid on him. This causes Conan’s shirt to shrink and disappear. What?

Anyways, after the nonsense wet t-shirt contest starring Conan, Evan is beaten up and gets a broken nose. The book quite literally describes his nose going in the wrong direction but is never addressed later.

When Kermit’s mom, Aunt Dee gets home, Kermit lies and says Evan fought with Conan. Evan gets in trouble.

At school the next day Evan talks with Andy from the past two books. Andy suggests using Monster Blood on Kermit. Evan says no, due to his past experiences with the stuff. Also, why is this the first idea for revenge. Monster Blood has never worked out before, and usually the only person it affects is Evan.

Andy’s clothes are still described as Day-Glo, after three books. At this point, I’m surprised Day-Glo Color Corp haven’t sued yet. Even more surprising, I’m surprised I haven’t made some sort of reference to Dayglo Abortions yet, I’d rather listen to them than read this book.

Andy and Evan go over to watch Kermit after school. Kermit has built a bomb and it’s about to blow up. Well, he’s actually pretending he made a bomb to prank Andy and Evan. Only Evan falls for it though, since he is Evan Stupid after all.

Then Kermit notices Andy’s mosquito bite. He grabs Andy and pours the blue mixture on her arm. Instead of her arm disappearing, it makes the mosquito bite go away. Huh?

Kermit then does Andy’s math homework. The book describes Kermit as breathing heavily and grinning while doing the work. This is a description of all time.

Once Kermit is done with that, he works on his current mixture to cure his dog Dogface of hiccups. Who names their dog Dogface?

Young Walter White finishes up his mixture. Evan tries to prevent Kermit from feeding it to Dogface but is too late. The mixture cures the hiccups in an instant.

Dogface then freaks out and runs around the basement. The dog proceeds to destroy everything in sight causing a huge mess. This is when Kermit’s mom, Dee shows up.

Kermit lies and says Evan caused all of the destruction and got the dog riled up. Aunt Dee believes Kermit without hearing from Evan at all. She gets mad at him and has him, and Andy clean the basement, as well as threatens him.

I wonder if Kermit sucks so much because he has one of the worst names of all time. Who names their kid Kermit?

Also, the hiccups come back after all of the excitement. Maybe Kermit isn’t actually smart, but just likes to experiment with chemicals.

Two days pass. Andy calls Evan to tell him Kermit did her homework wrong and she was publicly berated by her teacher. This is exactly what I would expect to happen in a Goosebumps book.

They decide to use the Monster Blood on Kermit to get revenge. However, Evan changes his mind. You see, he’s still suffering from Monster Blood PTSD. This condition affects roughly one Monster Blood protagonist. However, for once, Evan is being smart. Think of a better way to get revenge on Kermit, and if needed, get help.

The next day, Evan and Andy go to babysit Kermit. They try to get Kermit to play outside, which he reluctantly agrees to. Kermit pulls out some soda, which Andy and Evan drink and describe as overly sweet. This can’t possibly go wrong.

They play keep away with the frisbee outside, making sure that Kermit can’t reach it. After a few minutes, Evan and Andy start to laugh. The problem is they can’t stop laughing. Did Kermit just invent Joker Venom?

This causes Andy to throw the frisbee over the fence into Conan’s yard.

Conan comes into their yard. He starts to bully them but becomes infuriated by their laughing. Little Fredrick Graham Young after his most recent poisoning attempt wants his frisbee back. Conan throws it away and Kermit chases after his precious.

Kermit comes back and wants help finding his frisbee while Conan threatens Andy and Evan. They can’t stop laughing and Kermit encourages Conan to beat them up by lying about the reason they’re laughing. Conan proceeds to beat up Evan and throws Andy in a tree. I don’t know how he throws her in a tree, but physics probably went out the window a few years ago.

Later that night, Evan and Andy decide to use the Monster Blood to get back at Kermit. Evan also now owes Kermit a new frisbee, since Kermit lied again.

At this point I would quit as a babysitter. I would have probably quit much sooner. Who cares about family ties when you have to watch a psycho mad scientist. Well, to be honest, I wouldn’t even babysit to begin with, you can miss me with that.

The next day, Evan and Andy are babysitting Kermit again. Evan uses a chocolate bar to distract Kermit. This gives Andy the opportunity to put Monster Blood in Kermit’s latest concoction.

The mixture turns to a doughlike substance. As Kermit stirs it more the substance begins to grow. Kermit finds this amazing. However, it keeps growing and it’s growing too fast. This causes Kermit to get pinned against the wall and he screams out for help.

Before a child can be crushed to death in a Goosebumps book, the mixture explodes. Monster Blood flies everywhere. Everyone and everything get covered in the sticky gunk. Well, I guess he accidentally built a bomb; I think we’ve found the next Oppenheimer.

After the explosion, Andy let’s slip they caused it to grow. This is dumb. Kermit then wants to know what they used. Kermit continues to suck more by making threats.

This is when Evan realizes he accidentally swallowed Monster Blood. This is when I accidentally realized half of the events in this book are predicated on accidents. Evan begins to grow.

Evan, despite now having at least three incidents with Monster Blood, doesn’t know what to do. His clothes also grow with him, which is a first, but it would be quite awkward if Evan ran around the rest of the book with no clothes.

Evan tries to get up the stairs and out of the basement. He’s so big now, he gets stuck. Then he grows more. By creating holes in the walls of the basement staircase he’s able to get out and to freedom. This property damage is never mentioned again, so I guess Aunt Dee just never noticed.

When he gets outside, he realizes he’s as tall as the garage. Which means he is likely the tallest child alive now.

Evan sees Conan bullying other children in his backyard. Since Conan having siblings has never been mentioned, it appears somehow Conan has lured smaller children into his backyard. Call Chris Hansen.

Evan scares Conan and the other children by his size. This is when we get arguably the dumbest moment ever in a Goosebumps book. If you have an IQ above -2, then prepare to cringe. Conan remembers Monster Blood from the previous book and says he’s happy this didn’t happen to him, because he’s scared of heights.

Unprompted, Conan gives away his greatest fear in front of the kid he’s been bullying for ostensibly since Evan arrived in the neighborhood. With this information, Evan comes up with a genius plan. He lifts Conan into the air as high as he can and then puts him on top of a tree. This has the effect of trapping Conan due to his fear. Nice going Conan, you did this to yourself.

This is if Superman showed up at a Legion of Doom meeting with a bag of Kryptonite and told the team of supervillains these dumb rocks are his greatest weakness. Mind boggling. Also, assuming none of them already knew his weakness, but nevertheless, this has got to be one of the dumbest parts of a Goosebumps book so far.

Evan then goes out to have fun. He proceeds to cause property damage. Nice, now we’re really racking up crimes. First was Conan’s skateboard, then Evan stepped on and destroyed an entire car.

Evan then shows off at the playground by rescuing a kite from a tall tree. After which he plays baseball and now, he’s suddenly good at baseball and somehow the pitcher figures out how to pitch to him. Truly amazing.

This is when the book gets even dumber. Sure, giant baseball and Conan’s lines were pretty bad, but prepare yourself.

Conan has been rescued by firefighters in under two minutes and shown up with them to the park, which just so happens to be where Evan is at, which is a record of all time. If you spend any time thinking about this, it doesn’t make sense logistically, but sure, maybe Conan was able to get someone’s attention super-fast, then the firefighters showed up and got him down all in one minute and then headed over to the park and got set up with fire hoses. Why do I mention fire hoses? Well, the firefighters have them hooked up and aimed at Evan.

The firefighters are also now acting like police officers as they are there to take down Evan on the behest of Conan. How did Conan convince adult firefighters that a giant kid put him in a tree? I’ll never know.

Then the police show up. This is amazing, since the police are never in these books. They also believe a random lady that a giant kid was running around and smashed a car by stepping on it. I’m losing brain cells just reading this book.

Then a ton of police show up. This makes no sense, but sure, investigating a smashed car requires the whole squad to show up. The police are also convinced Evan is an alien and try to babytalk him. Yup, book is booking.

Evan says he wants to be left alone. This causes the police to say murder time and encourage opening fire on Evan. Luckily for Evan they don’t use bullets, but instead the fire hoses. Well, at least they didn’t kill an unarmed giant child. It’s also good that this post is on my own website and not on YouTube or social media, since I think would have to censor certain words. Trust me, all of my posts are definitely PG (so far).

Despite the social commentary and hoses, Evan is able to dodge everything coming his way and escape. Everyone panics. Turns out the police have a hard time following the world’s biggest child. I’ll get this out of the way, nobody rats on Evan later and all of the property damage and stuff never comes back to haunt him.

Evan gets home and his parents aren’t there, so he has nothing to worry about, except being giant. He hides behind a pile of lumber.

Kermit and Andy show up. All of the police are out searching for him. However, nobody told them who he was, so the police don’t know who Evan is.

This is when Evan comes up with a solution. He wants to use Kermit’s blue mixture to return himself to normal size. They go to Kermit’s house.

After retrieving the blue mixture from the basement, Evan realizes there is only a single drop of it left. The single drop doesn’t reduce his size. So, Kermit makes another batch. Evan uses the new batch and all it does is turn him blue. So, Kermit makes another batch. This batch makes Evan grow feathers. So, Kermit makes another batch. Stine is really padding this book out at the end.

Before Evan can get the next batch, the police show up. Andy goes to buy time while Evan gets the next batch from Kermit. Evan tries the last batch. This time he returns to normal size, finally. The police come around the back right after Evan turns back. I don’t know why the police thought it was so important to check Kermit’s backyard.

Aunt Dee returns home right after the police leave. Evan returns home.

That night Evan is in bed. He realizes the bed is way larger than it should be. He’s shrinking. This is when Trigger makes a cameo. Trigger carries Evan around in his mouth and to his parent’s room.

The book ends.

Review:

This book is mind blowing! In how bad it is. This is bottom of the barrel material. While I haven’t been a fan of the previous Monster Blood books, they seem to get worse with each entry. There’s still another one in the original series, and I have heard that it’s somehow the worst one. I’m dreading that entry now.

I can’t say much good about this one. The continuity is still pretty much intact, even if Cuddles has no mention. The characters haven’t changed or grown across the three books. Evan may be even more scared of Monster Blood, but he still has learned nothing. I guess the best I can say about this book is it’s consistent, consistently bad. I’m really struggling with compliments, but I’ll say this isn’t the worst Goosebumps entry, the plot moves along at a decent pace, and the book succeeds in making Kermit suck.

The bad is much more. First, this book lacks an impactful or satisfying ending. By having Kermit face no consequences, none of the characters learning anything, and having pretty lackluster final act, I think this book fails in its conclusion. This isn’t to mention all of the plot holes, all of the dumb decisions, and all of the overused plot points that have been done in previous books. This book basically takes the last Monster Blood book and basically replaces Cuddles with Kermit. At least this book isn’t that boring.

I’d rather eat Monster Blood, get chased by police, be a part of a mad scientist’s evil plans and take care of Cuddles than read this book again. In essence, this book sucks.

Before giving my rating, this is not the worst Goosebumps book so far. It’s still above books like “Why I’m Afraid of Bees,” but not by much. This is a far cry from “Welcome to Dead House” or “One Day at Horrorland.”

I’ll give this Goosebumps entry a 3/10. After two above average entries in a row, the extremes of Goosebumps are once again balanced. This continues the trend of roughly every other book being a bit above average and then a bit below average.

Twist ending:

Evan never stops shrinking. Mom, I shrunk my cousin.

Memorable line:

“Kermit is probably busy blowing up his house.” Facts.

Memorable moment, cliffhanger, etc:

Conan revealing his greatest weakness at the worst time possible will always stick with me as one of the worst moments I’ve read in a book. Evan really lucked out on his revenge plot with that one.

Bad parenting:

I guess the best one for this book is forcing Evan to babysit his cousin for below minimum wage… And on school nights. The horror!

Random references:

Conan the Barbarian, Jell-O, Atlanta Braves, Day-Glo, Fruit Roll-Up, and Walkman. Wow, I’d sure rather listen to music on Walkman than read this book.

Tropes in book:

Andy jump scare, crazy cliffhangers, pranks, monster blood, possible animal abuse, and pranks.

TV tie-in:

Yeah, right. You think they could green screen a giant 12-year-old? The budget ran out on the Monster Blood in the plane episode. Trust me, I’ll do a separate post for that episode alone at some point.

I’m rather happy this one didn’t get a tie-in, I think everyone who saw it would have suffered. Anyways, this Goosebumps book is enough by itself.

My rating for this Goosebumps episode: 10/10, since it doesn’t exist.

Come back soon for more Goosebumps fun and reviews.

To read the last Goosebumps review: https://goosebumpsblogger.com/goosebumps-28-cuckoo-clock-of-doom/