27: A Night in Terror Tower
“I shut my eyes, too. I tried to picture a boy and a girl. Frightened and alone. Trying to sleep in this cold stone room…”
If you’ve been anywhere in Europe, it won’t be hard to visualize R.L. Stine’s Tower of Terror, a castle-like heritage site from the Middle Ages. Once a fortress built by the Romans, the tower became London’s first debtor prison, then a prison for the king’s enemies. It’s a history lesson the book’s narrator, Sue, and her brother, Eddie, learn on a guided tour while their parents attend a conference back at the hotel.
And it’s a grim tour, complete with a comical executioner, a first-hand look at the torture devices used on prisoners, and a story about the prince and princess of York, two kids help captive in the tower by the king and eventually smothered in their sleep.
It’s a tour that gets under Sue’s skin. Every step she takes, she pictures the shackled prisoners shuffling their feet alongside her. And it’s through her eyes that Stine builds an excellent sense of atmosphere, bringing the tower to life as its history infects her.
Atmosphere established, Stine cuts straight to the scares. Sue and Eddie quickly lose their tour group and find themselves alone in the labyrinthine tower, hunted by a mysterious man cloaked in black. After nearly being captured by the man in a rat-infested sewer, they emerge into the parking lot only to discover it empty, their tour bus long gone.
They catch a cab back to the hotel, but they can’t find their parents, and suddenly, they can’t remember anything preceding the day’s events, not even their last names. And the man in black is back, only this time he captures and transports the kids to ancient London by stacking three white stones and chanting an ominous, mystical verse.
Let me pause to say that this is one of Stine’s most ambitious Goosebumps narratives—but he nails it. The hotel becomes an abbey, and the busy streets of London are replaced with rolling fields dotted with cabins, livestock, and people who look like they stepped off the set of Game of Thrones. Sue and Eddie are taken by the man in black — who we now learn is the Lord High Executioner — to the Tower of Terror to await their fate.
That’s right, the siblings are actually Susannah and Edward, the prince and princess of York, ordered by their evil uncle to die in the tower so he can take the throne. The kids learn all this when they’re visited in their cells by a kind sorcerer named Morgred, the man responsible for wiping their memories and sending them into the future to keep them safe.
I’ll spare you the details, but in the end, the two return safely to the present time minutes before they’re executed. As does Morgred, who becomes their new guardian. It’s a nice bookend to the story—ending where it began—and just as a new tour is passing through, Sue and Eddie discover history written anew: the prince and princess escaped their deaths, but no one knows how.
“A Night in Terror Tower” is as far-reaching as it gets for a Goosebumps book, from both a plot and setting perspective, but it’s well done. Stine’s fascination with the medieval era shows in every detail, from the peasants of ancient London tending to their root vegetables to the tower’s prisoners “pressing filthy rags into the cuts on their dirt-caked feet.”
As far as conflict goes, the book is relentless. Things get progressively worse for Sue and Eddie. They’re chased by a predator through a sewer, hassled by a taxi driver they can’t pay. They lose their memory (perhaps the scariest moment of the book) and forcefully travel time only to be captured, beaten, and battered in a box and then dragged up an endless flight of stairs to a cold, claustrophobic cell to await a death that’s been prescribed to them. It’s brutal, but it keeps you reading.
In short, “A Night in Terror Tower” feels like a mashup of Game of Thrones, The Fugitive, and Back to the Future, with a sprinkle of dementia. And despite a few discrepancies in logic as the book resolves, and a static villain with flat dialogue—which are the only reasons I’m docking it a point—it’s easily one of Stine’s best, a welcome tale for kids transitioning to heftier narratives.
4/5 drops of Monster Blood.
