Review:
Eleven-year-old Carly Beth is easily scared, which Steve and Chuck, two boys at her school, take full advantage of, doing things like giving her a sandwich with a worm in it and tricking her into thinking she's being bitten by a tarantula. She's so upset that she decides she needs a super scary costume for Halloween in order to properly get back at them.
I vaguely recall reading some of the first Goosebumps books, including this one, and deciding that I was probably too old for them. As with Christopher Pike's books, the original covers were, in a lot of ways, more memorable than the books themselves. Although this was technically a reread, I'd forgotten pretty much everything except the very end.
The setup for this reminded me a bit of Stine's Hit and Run (which was published only a year prior to this book), just aimed at a younger audience. Carly Beth, like Hit and Run's Eddie, has several really awful pranks played on her and decides to get even. Steve and Chuck weren't quite as terrible as Winks, but that was probably because they were too young to somehow acquire a human corpse for their "jokes."
Overall, I preferred this book's "tormented main character decides to get even" storyline more than the one in Hit and Run. Possibly because I felt more sympathy for Carly Beth? She never intended to hurt anyone, and the mask affected her in ways she never expected.
It did irk me somewhat that Stine couldn't manage to stick to his own rules. Technically, Carly Beth removed the mask twice, which shouldn't have been possible.
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