The Goosebumps book where kids tour a movie-based amusement park.
Erin Wright and her best friend Marty love the Shock Street film series. One day, they find out Erin's father is the designer of a new theme park based on the films, populated with animatronic robots of all the monsters from the series. Mr. Wright wants Erin and Marty to be the first kids to visit the park, but as they tour it, they notice the attractions aren't working quite as expected, and soon start to suspect the monsters may be real.
It was adapted into the first episode of the third season of the 1995 TV series. It was also adapted into an installment of the Goosebumps Graphix series, included in the Terror Trips and Slappy's Tales of Horror collections.
It was reissued in the Classic Goosebumps line in 2015 as a tie-in to the first movie.
The book provides examples of:
- Afterlife Express: A variant, but one of the last attractions Erin and Marty boarded to escape Shock Street is a tram full of ghosts, which they found out after getting aboard.
- Agony of the Feet: After losing her shoes in the struggle against the cemetery zombies, Erin is running away and her bare foot came down on something hard. This caused pain to shoot up her leg, and she started hobbling.
- Ask a Stupid Question...: At the cemetery, Marty falls down a grave, and he complains that it smells down there. Erin asks him what it smells like, and he replies, "Like dirt."
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: The giant robotic praying mantis.
- Blinded by the Light: Occurs when a flash of lightning, which was so bright that it caused Erin to cover her eyes, happens as Marty opens and gets electrocuted by opening Shockro's House of Shocks front door.
- Break the Cutie: Poor Erin, who keeps encountering scary situations before finally having a total breakdown because she thinks her father isn't her father... and she's right, because she's a robot he made.
- Can't You Read the Sign?: On Shock Street, there is a long fence, and on it is a hand-lettered sign that reads: DANGER. KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU. Indeed, behind the fence dwells the wolf-crab.
- Counting to Three: Erin does this before preparing to fire her stun gun at Wolf Girl and Wolf Boy. It doesn't work.
- Covered in Mud: After getting stuck and sinking into a deep mud puddle in the middle of Shock Street, only to be pulled out at the last minute, Erin and Marty end up with this trope.
- Creepy Cemetery: Erin and Marty visit one that's part of Shock Street, with hands that reach out from the graves and try to drag them under. They barely manage to escape.
- Dies Wide Open: Marty ends up like this in his case of electrocution.
- Downer Ending:Marty dies from an electric blast and Erin is killed by a sinister figure. And the reality is even worse, the children were malfunctioning robots all along who developed their own personalities. Mr. Wright opts to replace their memory chips and reset them so they can be put through the park again as machines lacking free will.
- The Ending Changes Everything: The story plays like a typical children's horror novel, with the protagonists surviving one hazard after another. However, the last chapter implies the possibility that the entire plot may very well have been the result of the Erin robot's programming going haywire.
- Foreshadowing: A few bits of it, such as Mr. Wright telling Marty not to blow a fuse. Because he's a robot.
- When the giant insects show up, Marty is in awe at how lifelike they are, behaving more like actual creatures than robots.Turns out Mr. Wright is that good a roboticist, and the kids are two of his most lifelike creations.
- Grave Humor: Whilst searching through the Shock Street cemetery, Marty inspects some of the graves and is amused by some of the names on the inscriptions. The ones he reads out loud are Jim Socks, Ben Dover, and Sid Upp.
- Kill the Lights: This occurs when Erin and Marty are looking through a haunted house during their tour. It gets so dark that they can't see their hands in front of their faces. The tram even has them ride almost like a rollercoaster in the dark.
- Logical Weakness: When cornered by the giant mantises, Erin deduces that they can overpower these monsters by attacking the legs, which functions much like exoskeletons of real insects - a single dent is more than enough to make the mantises collapse.
- Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: Erin and her friend Marty run into a cemetery, where undead attempt to pull them into the ground by their legs. Erin is able to free herself by slipping out of her shoes, and she takes off her socks so it's easier to run. She's able to free Marty by getting him to do the same, and the two spend the rest of the book barefoot.
- Mad Scientist: Erin's father, who makes robots for an amusement park. Including two meant to think they're human.
- Madness Mantra: The zombies at the cemetery do this when trying to get Erin and Marty to join them in their graves. The quote below is what they constantly say to the letter.Zombies: Come dowwwwwwwwnnnnnnn. Come dowwwwnnnnn with us.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: The main villain of Shocker on Shock Street VI, the movie that Erin and Marty are watching at the beginning of the book, is the wolf-crab. It had a head like a wolf, and a body like a giant crab. At the end of the movie, the police catch the wolf-crab, boiled him in a big pot of water, and then they served steamed crab to the whole town. Everyone sat around dipping him in butter sauce.
- No Seat Belts: Erin notices with unease that the tram which she and Marty stay in during their Shock Street tour involves this trope, as well as no safety bar.
- Not a Mask: When the Wolf Boy and Wolf Girl refuse to drop their act, after Erin repeatedly tells them to cut it out, a frustrated Erin then grabs the Wolf Boy's mask and pulls it to reveal the actor. Only to find out that's NOT an actor, but a real werewolf.
- This might double as a Call-Back, since something similar happened in One Day at HorrorLand, another book in the series revolving around protagonists stuck in a horror-themed amusement park where everything becomes too real.
- Out of the Frying Pan: At one point, Erin and Marty are in danger of drowning in a deep mud pit, only to be brought back up to the surface by a monstrously hungry pair of wolves named Wolf Girl and Wolf Boy. The two children are forced to make a run for it.
- Please Wake Up: Happens when Erin is trying to revive Marty after he was killed by electricity. He doesn't wake.
- Rapid-Fire "Yes!": This is Marty's reaction upon being told that he would be taking part in the first tour of the actual Shock Street.
- Red Herring: Before the tour begins, Erin and Marty are given two plastic guns, and are told to use them to stop any monsters that they see on the tour. They are brought up constantly throughout the book. But when the two actually come across Wolf Boy and Wolf Girl, Erin attempts to use one the guns on them. But she finds out that, although the gun buzzed and shot out a beam of light, it was useless against the two creatures. However, considering that Wolf Boy and Wolf Girl were implied to not actually be part of the tour, and were most likely just part of Erin and Marty's chaotic imaginations, of course the gun didn't work on them.
- Reed Richards Is Useless: Mr. Wright, much like Mr. Toggle, has created robots that not only easily fool people, but have the capacity to feel emotion. And he uses them to test theme park rides.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: The main protagonists, explaining why Erin's dad freaked out when Erin mentioned her mom, despite the fact that she does not have one.
- Robotic Reveal: The ending reveals that the two protagonists were actually malfunctioning robots who are then shut down by their creator.
- Sanity Slippage: Erin and Marty suffer this as their programming gradually became unstable.
- Scary Shiny Glasses: When confronted by her "father" in the end, Mr. Wright has this appearance, which freaks Erin out even further.
- Shout-Out: The title is a blatant shout-out to A Nightmare on Elm Street. In fact, one of the movies mentioned is A Nightmare on Shock Street.
- Show Within a Show: The story focuses on kids who are fans of an extensive film series, and elements from it feature deeply into the book's plot.
- Slaying Mantis: The cave scene is full of giant mantises, which reacts with hostility towards Erin and Marty.
- Spider Swarm: Erin and Marty run into one (when colliding through a large spiderweb with the tram) in the Cave of the Living Creeps part of the tour. It took quite a while for them to shake the creatures off.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: This book, when put into proper context.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Erin and Marty are robots, and are deactivated by their creator.
- Unreliable Narrator: Throughout the book, Erin thinks she's just a normal kid. The ending reveals she's a robot whose programming went a little screwy.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: How the book ends. Mr. Wright is disappointed with how the robots he programmed turned out to be all faulty, so he shut them down. This is despite them being so lifelike, capable of having genuine feelings, and one of them viewing Mr. Wright as her father. He then simply brings them to his shop to work more on them.
The graphic novel provides examples of:
- Adapted Out: Linda, the tour guide, is removed.
