Goosebumps/Radar

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Apparently, the ending to Egg Monsters from Mars just charged on through, to the point where even the fact that the male protagonist has a female name.
  • Read Monster Blood (the first one) as an adult (or post-adolescent with an immature sense of humor) and look for the implications of puberty (the constant references to "growing" and "feeling something weird and sticky" while Evan sleeps), masturbation (one scene had Evan trapped in a bathtub of Monster Blood and the way his struggle to get out of the tub was written, it sounded like Evan was on A Date with Rosie Palms), and Unresolved Sexual Tension between Evan and Andy (who's a girl).
  • Also read Stay Out of the Basement, where most of the lines (when taken out of context) allude to being "in the closet," being "out of the closet," "going down there" (referring to the basement), "experimenting," and fights over paternity (the clones of Dr. Brewster arguing amongst themselves over who's Margaret and Casey's real father).
  • The cover alone for My Hairiest Adventure (book #26) is just ripe for snarky book bloggers to make jokes about the myth that masturbation causes hairy palms.
    • My Hairiest Adventure also seems a heck of a lot like a metaphor for puberty--he's getting weird dark hair everywhere, it grows back after he tries to shave it off...It turns out that he's actually a dog, and the serum to keep him human is beginning to lose its effects.
  • Ghost Camp (a Spiritual Successor of Ghost Beach) has a passage about the male character Harry meeting a cute girl named Lucy and is impressed on how Lucy can eat a hot dog in just one gulp.
    • Then, there's the sequence where Lucy reveals to Harry that everyone in camp is a ghost and the only way to escape is to get inside a human body. The subtext of that sequence plays out like Harry is being raped.
    • And, on the non-sexual side of Getting Crap Past the Radar, Ghost Camp had a lot of scenes of kids doing violent things and not getting hurt (i.e., Lucy sticking her arm in a fire to get Harry's fallen hot dog, a girl getting decapitated from a soccer ball, a boy jamming a fork in his neck, Lucy pretending to drown to scare Harry, and a boy's foot getting impaled by a tent stake).
  • The blogs Blogger Beware and The Low-Rent Library have posts about Goosebumps' unintentional innuendo that somehow made it past the editors and wasn't brought to the attention of Moral Guardians who found the book series more controversial- because those poor children were always being attacked by monsters, witches, aliens, ghosts, vampires, and all matters of freaky and bizarre things!