11: The Haunted Mask
“The wind swirled around Carly Beth as if holding her in place. She felt like tossing her head back and howling…roaring up at the starless, black sky.”
Few things bring me greater joy than horror fiction, and one of those things is Halloween. Put the two together and I’m as happy as a blood-drenched fang. With that, I was especially excited to dive into “The Haunted Mask,” the eleventh Goosebumps book and the first Halloween-themed entry in the series. And, to my delight, it delivered everything I love about the holiday—and then some.
Carly Beth Caldwell is insecure. Mostly because she’s the laughingstock of her school; she scares easily, and no one knows this better than her friends Chuck and Steve. The pair is always playing tricks on her: pretending to be ghosts; tickling her leg like a tarantula is crawling on it; putting worms in her sandwich (#disgust).
But she’s also bothered by her appearance. For an eleven-year-old, the youngest Goosebumps protagonist yet, she’s particularly small. Her best friend, Sabrina, looks so much more sophisticated despite being younger than her.
On Halloween night, Carly Beth decides to repay her friends for the emotional hurt they’ve caused her. She wants to scare them shitless, but she can’t do it in the duck costume her mother sewed for her. She needs something hideous.
Luckily, a new party store just opened in town, and the shopkeeper is nice enough to let Carly Beth in past closing time. The man is cryptic and wears a black suit and a cape, not to mention a pencil-thin moustache lining his upper lip (John Waters, anyone?). Carly Beth seizes an opportunity to check out the store’s back room, where she finds exactly the type of masks she’s looking for. Unlike the masks on the main shelves (a gorilla, an alien, Uncle Fester, etc.), these masks are grotesque and lifelike, as if the rubber they’re made of is actually flesh—you know, the rotting kind.
She convinces the shopkeeper to let her buy one, though he firmly advises against it, and, before heading out to trick-or-treat with her friends, she adds the final touch to her costume: her sculpted head (a gift from her artist mother) impaled on a broom stick.
It isn’t long before the mask begins to feel warm and tight to her skin. It starts to consume and change her, and her voice turns deep and throaty. Feeling alive and angry, she storms the streets in a ravenous rampage, terrifying every trick-or-treater in her path, including her friends, who grow increasingly concerned by her behaviour.
Eventually, Carly Beth realizes the mask is taking over, but she can’t get it off; there’s no line between the rubber and her neck, so she rushes back to the party store for answers. Knowing she’d return and having waited for her all night, the shopkeeper confesses that Carly Beth’s mask is part of his “Unloved” collection, which he created in his lab. The faces were beautiful once, but something went wrong, and now they’re desperate to find hosts who’ll love them. Oh, yeah, and once you put one on, there’s only one way to remove it: through a symbol of love. That means Carly Beth has to find the papier-mâché head she discarded earlier in the night — her head, the one her mother sculpted for her.
Having finally retrieved the head, she holds it up to the floating masks that followed her out of the store (yeah, that happens), then puts it on her own head, over her mask, which makes the other heads disappear. With her symbol of love declared, she can now remove her mask.
In the final scene, Carly Beth admires herself in her mirror, vowing to stop criticizing her unfavourable features, like her small stature and tiny nose. Basically, she learns to love herself, which completes her character arc wonderfully.
On the surface, this is a book about a girl who wants revenge on her friends. But the symbolism is clear and surprisingly dark for a children’s book: Carly Beth is externalizing her insecurities. And the whole carrying around her severed head like a trophy thing? It’s both sad and harrowing. But it’s honest, and that’s the best kind of fiction there is.
“The Haunted Mask” also delivers loads of Halloween nostalgia: sorting through your loot when you get home from a night of trick-or-treating, if you’re privileged enough to do so; having to throw out unwrapped candy because your parents won’t let you eat it. At one point, Carly Beth gives Sabrina a blue jawbreaker, saying the last time she licked one it cut her tongue to shreds. Even the tone is spot-on for Halloween, from the familiar chill of an autumn night to the decorative skeletons dangling from porches.
Yes, for Halloween lovers, this one hits all the right notes. But it goes further to remind readers that no two people are alike — and that’s a good thing. There’s a reason it’s become one of the more iconic entries in the series. Like Halloween, it’s both scary and heartwarming, and that’s a wicked combo that’ll resonate for years to come.
5/5 drops of Monster Blood.
