It's been a few months since I did one of these, so it's time once again to open up the ol' case of the bumps and discuss the books outside of the general review format. Reason being that I got to thinking about Goosebumps' rogues gallery (specifically the original 62) and got to thinking of who counts as the scariest villain the series ever had. And for a franchise filled with monsters, the pick I come up with could be rather surprising. Is it Slappy? Well, while the dummies are the most famous villains, they are mostly just mischief makers who make veiled threats about child slavery. Is it a cursed object like Monster Blood, the camera or the haunted mask? No, because while they're deadly, the danger comes from the one who uses it foolishly. Is it King Jellyjam? The Grool? The Masked Mutant? Lucy Dark? Nope. None of the above. In fact, my choice for scariest villain is a monster, but not of the supernatural sort. Because my pick for scariest villain from the original Goosebumps is...
Mr. Toggle.
Now, I can see a lot of people scoffing at this. The creep from Piano Lessons Can Be Murder? Really? Well, let's recap the book and see why I came to the choice I made.
Piano Lessons Can Be Murder is the 13th book of the original series, released in November of 1993. The book follows Jerry Hawkins who, after his family moves to a new house, discovers a piano in the attic. A piano that is also haunted by a mysterious female ghost. Despite that, Jerry takes up interest in the piano and his family get him set up in the Shreek Piano School, under the tutelage of Dr. Shreek, a Santa-Claus like man. It all seems simple at first until Shreek takes a very creepy interest in Jerry's hands. More hauntings and warnings are made to Jerry to stay away from the school, but he still heads there.
The school feels empty, despite music constantly playing and what looks like teachers at every classroom door. Jerry gets chased by a strange sweeping robot, but gets saved by Mr. Toggle, the custodian and handyman of the school. Again, Toggle comes off as friendly. Even more friendlier than Dr. Shreek. He also has a knack for inventing musical instruments of all shapes and sizes. Ones that honestly could serve as great tools for the handicapped. As Jerry takes his leave of Toggle's workroom, he notices something. The book describes:
"As I jogged across the enormous workroom, I nearly ran into a row of dark, metal cabinets, shut and padlocked. Turning away from them, I suddenly heard a voice.
"Help!" a weak cry.
I stopped by the side of the cabinet and listened hard.
And heard it again. A little voice, very faint, "Help me, please!"
"Mr. Toggle -- What's that?" I cried. He had begun fiddling with the wires on his brown leather cap. He slowly looked up. "What's what?"
"That cry," I told him, pointing to the cabinet. "I heard a voice."
He frowned, "It's just damaged equipment," he muttered, returning his attention to the wires.
"Huh? Damaged equipment?" I wasn't sure I heard him correctly.
"Yeah. Just some damaged equipment," he muttered impatiently. "You'd better hurry, Jerry. Dr. Shreek must be wondering where you are."
I heard a second cry. A voice, very weak and tiny. "Help me -- please!"
I hesitated. Mr. Toggle was staring at me impatiently. I had no choice. I turned and ran from the room, the weak cries still in my ears."
So, while the book hasn't revealed what's going on just yet. The immediate perception of Mr. Toggle changes from here on in. He's clearly lying, more worried that Jerry will find out what he's doing and more concerning to him, discover what is in the cabinets. As the book wraps up to its climax, Dr. Shreek starts grabbing at Jerry's hands, almost trying to tear them off his arms. As Jerry soon discovers, Dr. Shreek is actually a robot. Even worse, all the teachers in the school are robots. And the pianos are being played by disembodied hands. While the cover and episode display it in more of a ghostly way, it's more implied that it's being done robotically. Jerry runs into Toggle again, and it's revealed. Toggle is more than just a strange, creepy inventor. He had an interest in music since he was a child. But due to having poor hands, he couldn't play any. So he lured others and took their hands to play his music. In other words, he's a serial killer. The book doesn't outright say it, but it's pretty much implied. The book states:
""You can't leave just yet," he said, his smile fading. "I need your hands, see."
"What?"
He pointed to a piano against the wall. A gray-suited instructor stood lifelessly still beside it, a smile frozen on his face. There were no hands suspended over the keyboard.
"That will be your piano, Jerry," Mr. Toggle said.
I started backing toward the double doors one step at a time. "Wh-why?" I stammered. "Why do you need my hands?"
"Human hands are too hard to build, too complicated, too many parts," Mr. Toggle replied. He scratched black, stubbly beard with one hand as he moved toward me.
"But --" I started, taking another step back.
"I can make the hands play beautifully," Mr. Toggle explained, his eyes locked on mine. "I've designed computer programs to make them play more beautifully than any live human can play. But I can't build hands. The students must supply the hands."
"But why?" I demanded. "Why are you doing this?"
"To make beautiful music, naturally," Mr. Toggle replied, taking another step closer. "I love beautiful music, Jerry. And music is so much more beautiful, so much more perfect, when human mistakes don't get in the way."
He took another step toward me. Then another. "You understand, don't you?" His dark eyes burned into mine."
A serial killer in a Goosebumps book. A book series with wacky magic and monsters and everything else. But for the first and really only time of the original 62 do we have a villain that feels frighteningly real. An obsessed madman who lures unsuspecting victims, many being children, to be mutilated. Hands brutally taken from them. And the truly grotesque coup de grace, he seemingly stuffs the bodies of his victims in tiny cabinets as they bleed to death. That latter aspect isn't outright said, but Toggle has to find a way to get rid of the bodies somehow. You could even question how he got away with it for so long, but perhaps he was a master of persuasion. And his ability to dispose of the remains allowed him to keep his alibi tight knit. He gets his comeuppance by the end when the ghost that was haunting Jerry is revealed to be a victim of his. The ghosts of the people he's murdered reclaim their hands and drag Toggle out of the school, into the woods, into the darkness where he's never seen or heard from again. Why they waited til this exact moment to take revenge is beyond me, but they get their revenge in the end, so that's what ultimately matters.
R.L. Stine made statements in the past about what the intention of Goosebumps was. That it was meant to be kid friendly horror. Focused on the fantastical over the realistic. Where the villains were often cartoonish monsters, or something that a kid could manage to defeat on their own. It rarely dealt with more realistic horror. And while yes, Mr. Toggle's reasoning is more akin to a villain on an episode of Criminal Minds, there still have been cases so similar to Toggle that makes the situation more nightmarish in hindsight, particularly when looking at this with an older set of eyes. Toggle reminds me of real life murderers like Ed Gein, a notorious serial killer who would murder his victims, and use their flesh and body parts for everything from chair seats to lampshades. And even the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, a cannibalistic murderer and necrophiliac. While it's unclear what Toggle did with the rest of the bodies, the thought of him with body parts in his fridge isn't too unrealistic.
The episode, obviously, doesn't elaborate on these darker elements. It's still established that Toggle did something with the hands of other people, but we don't get anything to the level of the cabinet scene. The episode changes his motivations to not being good at playing music because he was too lazy. The ghost is changed to his former piano teacher, and his eternal punishment is to be taught the piano forever. The episode is solid enough for the show, but loses a lot of the creepier feeling that the book originally had. It's still worth a watch for how cheesy it is.
And that's why I picked Mr. Toggle as the scariest villain. For while the series has more iconic monsters and cursed objects, the truest horror is trusting someone who seems friendly and interesting, only to learn that they're not just evil, but they want to hurt you. And they can hurt you. Just like the other people they've victimized. That, to me, is more scary than a bunch of lawn gnomes or blob monsters could ever be.
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