Hello, yes, this is a creep speaking.
The Goosebumps in which a prank backfires... and then counter-backfires.
After getting kicked off the school newspaper club, nerdy loser Ricky Beamer pulls a prank on newspaper head Tasha McClain by putting a message for all creeps to call Tasha after midnight. However, Tasha catches wise and puts Ricky's name and phone number in the message instead, leading to Ricky being stalked by lizard creatures (posing as the school's bullies) who need Ricky's help in planting transformation seeds to enslave all of humanity.
It was adapted into episode 19 of the second season of the TV series, with a novelization based on the episode being released as book 17 of the Goosebumps Presents series.
The book provides examples of:
- 555: Used for the phone numbers of Tasha and Ricky. Also, the back cover contains an instance of this trope as a joke.
- Abusive Parents: Downplayed, as Ricky's parents do laugh at him and mock him for his overactive imagination (whenever possible), regarding being the Commander of the Creeps and telling them that kids at school are Creeps, but they do love him, pay attention to him (for as much as they can anyway), and tell him to be braver and more adventurous throughout his life. Granted, his parents do not show that much concern regarding his turmoil over the Creeps situation, even though his mother does ask at one point if the children at school are still bullying him, obviously being interested in his well being.
- Adults Are Useless: With an exception (the principal at school, Miss Crawford, who offers Ricky help) most of the adults around Ricky do little to nothing to stop the bullying that he faces. So much so that at one point, when Ricky confronts Tasha in class about reversing his prank on her to him, even the teacher is laughing at him (this is omitted in the 2018 e-book though). His own parents show more concern for him as far as the bullying goes, but they laugh at him as well and openly mock him during dinner one night when he confronts them about the truth involving the Creeps. What makes this that much different from a standard Goosebumps book though? Most of the parents, the staff at school, and other adults in the books, are portrayed as abusive (though in most cases downplayed), useless, and overly critical through contempt.
- An Aesop: Bullying is wrong. You can only push a person like Ricky so far before they decide they've had enough, and retaliate in their own way.
- And Then John Was a Zombie: Some reptilian monsters that can turn into human form come to think that Ricky, who is bullied by most of his school, is one of them. They have plotted how to transform everyone in the school, and then the town, country and world, into Creeps like them and the hero is trying to stop them from feeding everyone the transforming seeds, which he manages to do for the first few tries without managing to arouse suspicion. In the last moment, when he is mocked one more time while trying to stop everyone from eating the seed-filled chocolate chip cookies (the seeds look just like chocolate chips) that the Creeps decided to hand out for free at the school bake sale, he is told that he will be the ruler of all Creeps and no longer a target for bullies. Ricky does a quick Face–Heel Turn, treats everyone to eat the cookies, and eats one himself, becoming the real Creep leader.
- Assimilation Plot: The Creeps' main plan is to turn everyone into them. And they succeed, at least with Ricky's school.
- Asshole Victim: Honestly, after all the shit Ricky's had to put up with, it can be hard to feel much sympathy when the entire school gets enslaved by the Creeps.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Ricky pulls a Face–Heel Turn and becomes the Creeps' overlord.
- Bowdlerise:
- The 2018 ebook changes the Creeps telling Ricky the kids will be his slaves to them just saying they will follow him.
- A line about Ricky's teacher joining in laughing at him is removed.
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: When Ricky tells his parents about how he is the Commander of the Creeps and how a few other children at school are Creeps, they respond by telling him that they are creeps too, or rather martians, werewolves, martian werewolves.
- Bully Magnet: Ricky Beamer. With all the bullying he goes through, nobody note is surprised when he snaps and joins the Creeps' Assimilation Plot that enslaves the whole school by turning them into Creeps.
- Captain Obvious: When showing Iris around the school as part of her first day there, Ricky tells her that a busy room during lunch is the cafeteria when they arrive. He then immediately lampshades this by thinking it was stupid for saying it out loud, as what else could it be?
- Chekhov's Gun: When Ricky is showing Iris around, he tells her that no one eats the macaroni from the cafeteria because it's so gross. Later, the Creeps want to put the seeds in the food and Ricky puts it in the macaroni. Thus no one eats it and that plan fails.
- Contrived Clumsiness: Ricky is given a bag of seeds by the Creeps to be put into the cafeteria meals to turn the school into Creeps. To thwart this, Ricky pretends to accidentally trip, spilling the seeds onto the floor to be contaminated, and unable to be served. The Creeps just hand him another bag, saying that they have spares.
- Contrived Coincidence: In one attempt to turn the school into Creeps, they have Ricky put the transformation seeds into the lunch food and have them transform after they eat it, to which he chooses the macaroni to put them in. It turns out, which Ricky remembers later on, that nobody eats the macaroni at lunch. As a result, nobody transforms into Creeps because of this attempt. Neither Ricky nor the Creeps bring up the odds of that actually happening.
- Conveniently Timed Distraction: After typing in the message in the newspaper as a prank towards Tasha, Ricky is about to leave the room through the window, but then Tasha nearly comes into the room and is about to see him. Ricky braces himself to be caught. But then a teacher outside the room calls Tasha back for something, which made her leave back out the door. Ricky does a Cathartic Exhalation and then exits.
- Couldn't Find a Pen: After getting harassing phone calls, Ricky goes to school and finds a message written on the back of his locker door, asking him when the Creeps will meet.
- Crush Blush: Implied. When asking Ricky to help her get ingredients to make something for the school bake sale, Iris had pink circles around her cheeks. Ricky is quick to notice this.
- Door Slam of Rage: Ricky does this after he tries telling his parents during dinner about the Creeps, only for them to laugh about it and mock him.
- Double Take: A quite dramatic example. As Ricky is trying to prevent the students from eating the free cookies, which will transform them into Creeps, Brenda informs him that they will be his slaves. Ricky continues to keep thinking about saving the students, when he suddenly dwells on what Brenda says, which piques his interest. He then turns back to her to repeat what she just said, and when she does, Ricky immediately changes his mind about saving the school from assimilation.
- Epic Fail: After the macaroni plan fails, the Creeps are trying to think of a new one. Wanting to get rid of the seeds without transforming anyone, Ricky tells them that maybe they should plant the seeds into the ground so they can grow trees that would bare lots more seeds. The Creeps not only are not in on this plan at all, this causes them to be incredulous and suspicious of him, and they demand that he transform in front of them to prove that he really is their Commander. If Iris hadn't come to the scene to pretend to be a lieutenant to Ricky and vouch for him, Ricky would have been exposed.
- Exact Eavesdropping:
- It turns out later in the story that Iris saw Ricky being led away by the Creeps, saw them transforming, and heard the plans they were making, all at a distance. So, she pretends to be one of them in order to secretly team up with Ricky to take them down.
- A minor example of this occurs earlier. When Iris heard that her new school has students join clubs to avoid summer school, she thought that the school news club would be a good choice. But when she goes to the room that hosts the club, she saw the whole scuffle between Ricky and two of his bullies, Ricky accidentally spilling soda on a computer and damaging it, and Tasha chewing him out and kicking him out of the club. When Ricky turned to leave, he was dismayed to see that Iris saw the whole event unfold. But she reassures him that she supports him, and that she changed her mind about joining the club after seeing how terrible Tasha is.
- Face–Heel Turn: The whole story ends on this note. After seeing how futile opposing the Creeps is, and wanting revenge against his bullying classmates, Ricky decides in the end to become a Creep himself, because he would be their leader.
- Foreshadowing: Early on, Wart pins Ricky to the ground and Iris shouts at him to let him up. Wart seems confused for a moment, like he's unsure what to do, and oddly enough, he obeys. Also, some of the dialogue from him, Jared, David and Brenda in the early chapters is a little "off" considering they're human teenagers. It turns out that they aren't human, but are most likely aliens whom are posing as human bullies.
- Frivolous Lawsuit:
- After Ricky accidentally broke Tasha's camera, she says that she'll have her father sue him.
- And when confronted by the bullies, Wart informs him that his father is suing Ricky for filling the inside of his car with water.
- Gang of Bullies: Wart, Jared, David and Brenda. They not only like to make fun of Ricky (as does everyone else), they even try to injure him For the Evulz and humiliate him in front of his only friend.
- Get Out!: After Ricky accidentally messes up the school computer because of his enemies, an enraged Tasha fires him from the newspaper club and tells him to get out. She even shoos him away like one would shoo a dog.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Ricky's message in the school newspaper was intended to be a simple prank, but it ends up being the one thing that attracts the Creeps, and starts his predicament in the first place.
- Growling Gut: Ricky has this after planting transformation seeds in the macaroni. But instead of going to the lunchroom to eat and quench his growling stomach, he guiltily hides in a stairwell instead, not wanting to see his fellow students transform into Creeps. Luckily, they don't.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Subverted. At the bake sale, in a vain attempt to prevent everyone from eating the free cookies and transforming into Creeps, Ricky leaps down onto the pile of cookies and tries to gobble them all down so only he would transform. However, he starts getting pelted by food from the other students, which distracts him. This distraction, however, does partially convince him to abandon this Heroic Sacrifice attempt and instead turn against them in favor of actually transforming them.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Downplayed, as the Creeps are still evil, but we find out that the four Creeps were only bullying Ricky in order to fit in when they were in disguise. Tasha and the other human bullies, however, have no such excuse and are just assholes.
- In Medias Res: The story starts with Ricky pulling his big prank, then taking us back to explain why he resorted to doing this.
- I Warned You: Iris does this with Ricky when she warned him about going through with his prank against Tasha, only for it to backfire on him. He unhappily tells her not to rub it in.
- Lame Comeback: When Tasha screams at Ricky, fires him from the newspaper club, and tells him to get out of the room, Ricky tells her she's so unfair. He even notes to himself that he sounded like a baby.
- Lizard Folk: The Creeps' default forms are lizard-like alien creatures with purple, scaly skin. Complete with long flickering tongues they can use to give each other high-fives.
- Love-Interest Traitor: Subverted. Initially, Iris appears to be on the side of the Creeps, even claiming to be their leader's subordinate, but it later turns out she's a genuinely nice person who wants to help out. Amazingly, the Creeps don't ask her to prove it.
- Made a Slave: Ricky is trying to prevent the people at the bake sale from eating the transformation cookies, but the Creeps persuade him to change his mind by telling him that if he gets the others there to transform, they would all be his slaves. Ricky, already having suffered enough turmoil by the school in general, is finally convinced to go through with the plan, and tells everyone else to help themselves.
- Mass Transformation: The Creeps intend to turn all the kids at the school into Creeps, and succeed.
- Multipurpose Tongue: The Creeps constantly use their tongues to slap each others' tongues, sort of like high-fives. And later, when a terrified Ricky attempts to leave from them to excuse himself for a next time to meet, Wart uses his tongue to wrap it around Ricky's neck and turn him around by pulling in his tongue.
- Not Quite the Right Thing: At the school news club, when Wart and David fight with Ricky over a can of Pepsi, the can slips from Ricky's grasp and lands on Tasha's computer keyboard. Feeling guilty about this, Ricky grabs some paper towels and rushes over to mop up the keyboard, but to his horror, this ends up messing up the computer and shuts it down. Tasha is furious with Ricky over this.
- Open Mouth, Insert Foot: After the macaroni plan fails, the Creeps confront Ricky and ask him why it did not work. As Ricky suddenly remembers that it's because no one eats the school macaroni, he says it aloud. He then instantly thinks that he shouldn't have said that, and wanted to kick himself. When they ask him how he knew that, he recovers himself and lies by saying that a student told him after he put the seeds in.
- Product Placement: Pepsi/Frito Lay did a merchandising tie-in with Goosebumps in the late '90s, leading to Pepsi products turning up both in this book and Attack of the Jack-O'-Lanterns. It stands out as these are the only entries to mention Pepsi, as usually it's Coke being referenced.
- Puppy Love: Ricky has a thing for Iris and gets really excited when she asks him to help her get things ready for a bake sale.
- Rapid-Fire "But!": When Tasha furiously tells Ricky that he's off the paper, he initially responds this way. He even compares it to sputtering like an outboard motor.
- Riddle for the Ages: Neither the book nor the episode explains what the Creeps actually are, or where they come from. They are implied to be aliens of some sort, but we never see any spaceships or learn anything about their home planet if this is the case.
- Shaped Like Itself: This gem when Ricky describes the Gang of Bullies whom he deals with: "I call them my four enemies because... they're my four enemies."
- Sleepless Alarm Clock: At midnight, Ricky starts getting calls on his bedroom phone by Creeps, which annoys him and his parents. It's only until two in the morning when Ricky finally took the phone off the hook. He spent the rest of the night trying to fall asleep, and when he finally did at seven o'clock, his alarm went off.
- Spraying Drink from Nose: At lunch, while David and Wart were squirting milk cartons at each other, Brenda laughed so hard that chocolate milk ran down her nose.
- Take Over the World: This is the ultimate goal of the Creeps.
- Teens Are Monsters: The Creeps themselves, both figuratively and literally.
- Throat-Slitting Gesture: One of the Creeps, Wart, shows this gesture to Ricky to indicate how dead the plan for assimilating the school would be if he doesn't cooperate with them.
- Today, X. Tomorrow, the World!: A motto of the Creeps to describe their assimilation of their kind is, "Today, the school. Tomorrow, the world!" And by the end of the story, the school itself is heading in this direction.
- Wham Line: To stop Ricky from preventing the assimilation plan from going through, Brenda tries to reason with him. As she is doing this, she eventually says: "They will all be your slaves!" This sentence is what actually gets through to Ricky, and to get back at the school for picking on him so much, he lets the assimilation plan go forth with a wham line of his own: "Enjoy the cookies".
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: While the various stories rarely have their location specified, the series is generally inferred to take place in the States. The opening chapter for this one, on the other hand, has the protagonist's parents watching news about the weather in Nova Scotia, which is in Canada. However, his enemies at one point force him to recite the Star-Spangled Banner to humiliate him, which is unlikely for a Canadian to recall.
- Who's Laughing Now?: Ricky at the end when he decides to become the Creep Commander for real, and all of his bullies will end up being his slaves.
- World of Jerkass: With the exception of Ricky and Iris, everyone is a jerk in this story!
