It's time to vanish ladies and gents, as we enter the sixth book in the original 62 Goosebumps. It's Let's Get Invisible AKA Drug Allegories-A-Poppin'!
COVER STORY
Oof, this cover. Don't get me wrong, I think the colors and shadows work fine, much like most of Jacobus' work. It does give a good feel of a musty old attic with the cobwebs, the darkness and whatnot. But I gotta admit that kid looks like a doofus as he sees himself fade away. I mean, with his legs gone, it does sell the invisibility, but as an engaging and scary cover, it just doesn't work.
STORY
Protagonist of the story is Max Thompson. We start this tale of invisibility with his twelfth birthday. He has regular kid problems, like hair concerns and a little brother named Noah, or as the book calls him, Lefty, due to him being left handed. His gimmick is being the annoying little brother, as well as constantly throwing a softball with his left hand, breaking things. Well, it's still better than Bird, that's for sure. His birthday party guests are his friends Zack, Erin and April. Zack's present for Max is X-Force comics, which proves my point back in Say Cheese and Die, R.L Stine is really Rob Liefeld in disguise. Or maybe he saw that his son had a couple issues and he threw it into the books as a reference.
After some twister and watching The Terminator (ah, 90s parenting where you could get away with that), Zack leaves, and the other kids wind up in the attic. Inside is a bunch of old junk, but the most interesting item is a strange door leading to a dark room. Inside they find a mirror with a light attached above it. Max turns it on, and to the shock and surprise of his friends, he vanishes. He's still there, but is now invisible. He got Let's Get Invisibled! When the light is turned off, he comes back to normal. He's skeptical about their reactions, so tells the girls to do it themselves. But their parents show up, ending that.
Despite still being skeptical, Max goes up in the attic later that night to check if it's true. Lefty, being annoying, shows up and nags at him to let him go invisible as well. The two kids stand under the mirror light and turn it on. They screw around, wrestling each other like a match between two John Cenas. They turn the light off, but it takes longer for their visibility to return. The kids shrug it off, but now they have something they can use for fun. Because they're young kids and thankfully this book won't divulge into Hollow Man level skeeziness. They then invite their friend Zack up to the attic and use the invisibility to scare him. But the longer Max stays invisible, he begins to feel weak and weary, so he turns the light back off. It takes a lot longer for him to come back this time, and when he finally does return to normal, he is weak at the knees from it.
But instead of taking that as a clear sign to stop using the mirror (because this is a Goosebumps book and these kids never learn to just stop using the creepy cursed item), Max and his friends keep using the mirror. Zack uses it for over five minutes, and suffers the same weariness that Max went through. He does make mention how cool the mirror is and how it can let him sneak into the girls bathroom, making me realize I was too quick to not think Jovial Bob wouldn't get skeezy. They also begin to hold contests to see who could stay invisible the longest. And the more they get invisible, the more they want to go back, hence the drug allegory I mentioned. This racing goes on until Max ends up really suffering from the effects of invisibility, not to mention the kids being idiots, break the chain on the light switch.
We get a whole scene where Lefty goes invisible while the family is at the dinner table. After that incident, Max checks the mirror again, but now hears whispers and what appears to be figures of some sort inside the mirror. The next day Lefty goes invisible again, but this time he goes silent for a bit, then when he returns, he seems kind of different. He also seems more eager to agree to stop using the mirror. But the other kids, supposedly invited by Lefty, all want more and more turns with the mirror to continue the competition. They go for longer and longer, but each time they return, they seem to be acting differently than they were before. They put Max under the mirror, and they keep him invisible so long that he feels himself being sucked into the mirror.
Inside the mirror, Max sees a mirror image of himself. It turns out that this Max's reflection, and he wants to switch with him. The mirror acts as a sort of portal to the mirror world and vice versa. That's what the source of the dizziness was each time the kids went invisible. It was the mirror forms slowly trying to usurp them. Zack and Erin were easily sucked in with their reflections taking their places. Max escapes the mirror, only for the reflections to try and shove him back in. But just before the switch can be made, Lefty shows up and throws his softball at the mirror, breaking it. The reflections vanish back into the broken mirror and the original versions of Zack and Erin return.
TWIST ENDING
With the mirror destroyed and the kids just deciding to just up and forget about this whole situation, Max and Lefty play some catch to get their minds off things. But Max soon notices that Lefty is throwing right handed. So, the real Lefty is trapped in the mirror world forever. And that's kind of a win. It seems this Lefty (err, Righty) is nicer and saved the others instead of letting them be trapped, while the bratty Lefty gets stuck for all eternity. I call that a fair exchange.
CONCLUSION
Part of me thought going in that Let's Get Invisible! would be one of the rougher sits, but honestly, I think it's not that bad a story. It almost feels like a reverse Say Cheese and Die, where the cover is terrible, but the story is actually decent. Not amazing, and the whole mirror stuff does get dull until we throw in this whole mirror world stuff at the end. But it's better paced and it actually build up to the ending in far better ways than most of the books we've covered so far. It does feel like a drug allegory in that the mirror goes from a mere curiosity to a regular interest, ultimately into a full blown addiction. The more you take it, the longer you want that high to last.
But like all addictions, it comes with deadly circumstances, and you wind up losing a part of yourself in the process, until you don't even feel like yourself anymore. You feel like a cheap, broken reflection of what you once were. Holy crap Jovial Bob, you actually kind of made a good message for once. And you did it without having to to explain some crazy, over the top origin story that cheapens the message you seem to be trying to send. Consider me wowed. You sir, have earned yourself a cookie. Let's Get Invisible! gets a B.
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