History Literature / GiveYourselfGoosebumps

* GenreSavvy and NoFourthWall: In one of the books, one of the choices has you deciding whether or not to eat some blue eggs. If you choose to eat them, you will suddenly stop, remember that you are in a ''Goosebumps'' book (where eating weird-colored food is usually a bad idea), and spit the eggs out. It turns out that the eggs cause you to [[spoiler:become an obedient slave of the aliens running the camp]].

** ''Please Don't Feed The Vampire'': You have been turned into a vampire and are faint from lack of blood. You are trapped in a room with other vampires who start drinking from the Dracula {{Expy}}, giving you a chance to escape. If you choose to stay and drink some of the blood (not an unreasonable choice, since your character is now a vampire and needs blood) the next page abruptly breaks the fourth wall, tells you that drinking blood isn't normal, advises you to put down the book, and questions whether you are a real vampire or just seriously disturbed.

** Similar to the ''Bat Wing Hall'' example, one of the two main storylines in ''Little Comic Shop of Horrors'' is to find that you are stuck in the world of comic books, and having to decide which of two comics you will enter. One of those gives you the option going into a third different comic, but all choices made from there end badly - you're either killed by the superhero who thinks you're a spy, or by his team of sidekicks who get angry when you inadvertently insult them.

* NeverTrustATitle: Nowhere in ''Escape From Horror House'' are you required to escape from a house - the story is based around you getting rid of poltergeists that have invaded a house. ''Elevator to Nowhere'' doesn't feature an elevator, but a dimension-hopping device that doesn't even look like an elevator.

** ''Please Don't Feed The Vampire'': You have been turned into a vampire and are faint from lack of blood. You are trapped in a room with other vampires who start drinking from the Dracula {{Expy}}, giving you a chance to escape. If you choose to stay and drink some of the blood (not an unreasonable choice, since your character is now a vampire and needs blood) the next page abruptly tells you that drinking blood isn't normal, advises you to put down the book, and questions whether you are a real vampire or just seriously disturbed.

** ''The Knight in Screaming Armor'': You're being chased up a bell tower by some ghost monks, who want to make you one of them. You reach the bell, and there is a kettle of black liquid, which probably won't even harm ghosts, and when you reach for the bell, the monks cower, which means they obviously fear the bell for some reason, so naturally you next choice is to ring the bell. No! What you're meant to do is pick up the kettle, which is too heavy for you, and then fall over and ring the bell by accident! Pulling the rope to ring the bell causes it to break, giving the monks time to catch up to you...

* ThisLoserIsYou: In ''Welcome to the Wicked Wax Museum'', choosing to not go down a corridor gives you a happy ending, but at the cost of the author BreakingTheFourthWall to insult your cowardice. For ''several paragraphs''. Of course, this being an R.L. Stine book, going down the corridor gets you [[spoiler:[[OffWithHisHead decapitated]]]]. In other books, making a "safe" choice (such as deciding to go into the storm cellar during a hurricane rather than search for your dog) leads you to a swift happy ending on the next page, but with the book pointing out that you didn't get to have any adventures because you are too chicken to take any risks.

* ViewersAreGoldfish: ''Zapped in Space'' uses this against you in the Abominable Snow Woman storyline. In one part of the book, the right clue to advance in the game was given away with the game's poster when you entered the arcade way back in page 3 or 4. [[ChekhovsGun There was a minor description of the lights' colors near the game's poster that was irrelevant at the time]], but was a major clue for later. This effect is magnified if you do the Abominable Snow Woman storyline ''second''. Unless you have a sharp memory or cheated to see the answer, you'll have to guess the right colors for the lights. Guess wrong, and you'll be led in the wrong direction.

* WithFriendsLikeThese: Sometimes, your friends don't make you feel appreciated in a bad situation. In ''Scary Birthday To You!'', if you volunteer to stay at your house so everyone else can do the scavenger hunt, they leave you behind with [[BigBad Dr. Death]] with no intentions of coming back. In ''Ship of Ghouls'', when everyone's evacuating the bombed yacht, if you (somewhat foolishly) decide to swim hundreds of yards away to reach your best friend instead of getting into a lifeboat that's much closer, he tells you to go away, because your added weight on the plank he's hanging onto would make both of you sink. [[JustifiedTrope Kind of justified in hindsight]], though his choice to reject you causes you to drown. "Deep in the Jungle of Doom" has an ending where your friend taunts you about being to scared to go into a cave before her, and when you do [[spoiler: you hear her voice acting like she's feeding someone, and then the cave closes, because it's not a cave - it's a monster's mouth]] Also the majority of books have at least one bad ending which is caused by your "friend" even if it means ignoring continuity for it to work.

* MortonsFork: Not a common occurrence, but some books force you into a pair of unpleasant choices that both end in disaster.
** ''Alone In Snakebite Canyon'' at one point presents a pair of animal morphs that [[LampshadeHanging even the book admits are are less-than-ideal]]: a slow-as-molasses tarantula to cross a busy street, and a mosquito through a bat infested cave, right after you ate a mosquito when you were temporarily in bat morph. They end as well as you expect. [[TakeAThirdOption The logical third option]] - i.e., turn into a tarantula and wait in the cave until the snake eyes reset into two other and presumably better animal choices - was completely absent.
** ''The Werewolf of Twisted Tree Lodge'' presents an interesting scenario when you're trapped and facing a bunch of creatures that could easily kill you for their own amusement in the middle of the woods. One option is to trick them into playing tag and running like hell to escape, but they easily catch up and kill you. The alternative? Convince them that they'd all turn on each other if they try to eat you, because they're all different creatures, and require different needs when it comes to eating humans. By doing that, they'd either let you live to not turn on each other, or go in an all out battle royale to see who gets to eat you. Instead, they claim that they're diplomatic monsters, and that their different needs doesn't interfere at all with feeding on you. So in the end, you're still dead.
* NoEnding: Sometimes, your adventure won't end with a "The End" message. Sometimes, you'll just get thrown into an [[FateWorseThanDeath infinite loop]] that sends you flipping through the same couple of pages '''forever'''. In ''Escape From the Carnival of Horrors'', you may find yourself traveling through a labyrinth with no end in sight until you hear a voice. You turn towards it, travel down another neverending tunnel until you hear another voice... and turn back the way you came.

* FailureIsTheOnlyOption: Make too many unwise choices, and you might run into a pair of choices that ends badly, no matter which one you choose. For readers who didn't acquire certain items earlier in the adventure, when it comes time to use something to save yourself, you won't be able to do so. Sometimes, the books conceal the page number to make sure you actually ran into the item or piece of essential info instead of cheating and/or punish you for trying to cheat.

** In ''The Curse of the Creeping Coffin'', you can get chased by a civil war-era ghost, which will lead you to fall from a bridge with a 50-50 chance to survive the fall. If you die, you become a ghost who does henious acts like [[LeaningOnTheFourthWall crossing out the page numbers of the very same book you're reading]]. If you survive, the ghost hears your groaning and goes to finish you off. The author then clarifies that you had a chance to survive ''the fall'', not the book.

For '90s kids, this series was the first (and perhaps only, save for the ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' Alternamorphs books) exposure they've had to the CYOA genre. Like other books in the genre, you, the reader, are required to make potentially dangerous choices to escape whatever dire circumstances you find yourself involved in. Depending on the book, this may involve fleeing a haunted house, [[JackassGenie a deceptive genie]] or escaping a carnival of horrors (i.e., [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin the book pictured to the right]]). And of course, [[TheManyDeathsOfYou lots and lots of grisly deaths]].

Most of the books follow a format which splits the adventure into two separate paths. The primary one follows the book's advertised premise more closely. The secondary one usually follows the aforementioned premise as well, but focus on a different aspect of the quest. For example, the first book, ''Escape from the Carnival of Horrors'', has you either going through the carnival's games or the carnival's rides to make your escape. Other books have two different storylines only tangibly connected to each other. ''Zapped in Space'' (#23), for example, has you choosing between the advertised virtual reality space adventure or another virtual reality game, which involves a trek through a snowy tundra to hunt down [[BigBad an Abominable Snow Woman]]. Few books, like ''Checkout Time at the Dead End Hotel'' (#27), go so far as to focus entirely on one central quest.

In terms of overall design, ''Give Yourself Goosebumps'' doesn't deviate much from its spiritual CYOA predecessors, other than including references to other ''Literature/{{Goosebumps}}'' books. Usually, this involves a quiz question of some sort, though ''Return to Terror Tower'' and ''Revenge of the Body Squeezers'' actually continue where the original books left off (i.e., ''Night at Terror Tower'' and series 2000's ''Invasion of the Body Squeezers'').

Because publishing company Scholastic forced R.L. Stine to write many volumes of ''Literature/{{Goosebumps}}'' in a short period of time -- including the main series -- it's likely that several ghost writers wrote some ''GYG'' installments. As a result, [[LoveItOrHateIt the novels really vary in quality]]. [[http://www.gamebooks.org/show_series.php?name=Give+Yourself+Goosebumps Demian's Gamebook]] [[http://www.gamebooks.org/show_series.php?id=184 Web Page]], despite the obvious bias reflected by him and other reviewers, does a decent job showcasing the erratic nature of the series. In contrast, [[http://mjnseifer.livejournal.com a livejournal blog by MJN SEIFER]] gives more detail and compassion for the series, but it's not quite complete (as of September 14th, 2011, it's only on book #35). Nevertheless, most ''GYG'' books are worth reading at least once, though some feel more tightly constructed and exhibit better gameplay than others.

* BittersweetEnding: Not ''all'' of the non-good endings turn out to be awful. For example, in ''The Deadly Experiments of Dr. Eek'' (book #4), you get turned into a dog, but at least you managed to return home safely and live as the new family pet! In ''Zapped In Space'', you get trapped in your gaming partner's body, but both of you at least escaped the game intact. Both''It's Only a Nightmare'' and ''All Day Nightmare'' have endings where not only is your adventure in the book revealed to be just a dream, [[SchrodingersButterfly but so is your entire human life]], and you're really just an animal. It ''sounds'' like a bad ending at first, until you realize that you are happy with your "new" life (mostly because it's your REAL life).

** In ''Trapped in Bat Wing Hall'', there's a side quest within the Blue Team storyline that has you wandering an underground cave to become a human again. What makes this example devious is that the lengthy side=quest ends badly, no matter what you do. The ''best'' ending? You get trapped in a library owned by monsters, who threaten to eat you, unless you read every book inside. [[FateWorseThanDeath Ouch]]. The ''worst'' ending? You get sent to a zoo when your friend catches you.

* FridgeLogic: It doesn't get anymore improbable than ''Into the Jaws of Doom''. Great book as it is, if there really was a murderous super computer in a science museum, you sure as hell wouldn't be fighting alone with a random computer avatar. Even without that plothole, that still doesn't explain the bizarre exhibits in the third floor, like the mirror maze with a spiky pendulum... Or the random giant magnet... Or the tiny germ that can't stop growing... [[OverlyLongGag or the weird ending where you randomly ran into a group of people]]! And that faulty smoke bomb... that was just cheap.

** ''Weekend at Poison Lake'' is this, literally. You pick between four short adventures based on Poison Lake, which comes with their own designated lucky number, and you decide how (or if) to use your lucky number during any perilous moment. Interesting concept, but the problem is that there was no logical way to deduct when to appropriately use your luck, as it could backfire at anytime. [[ScrappyMechanic Yeah...there's a reason this book wasn't well regarded]].