The Goosebumps book in which invisibility comes at a price.
At his birthday party, Max finds a floor-length mirror in his attic. Pulling the light switch makes him invisible; pulling it again makes him reappear. He and his friends know this means one thing - time to play pranks on people! Oh, and they also time how long each can stay invisible.
But things start to get out of control. First, they don't reappear quite immediately. Each time they become invisible, it takes longer and longer to return. There's something in the mirror that wants to keep them hidden. Forever.
It was adapted into the 13th episode of season 2 of the 1995 TV series, with a novelization based on the episode being released as book 11 of the Goosebumps Presents series.
It was later reissued in the Classic Goosebumps line in 2015 as a companion to the first movie.
It is the longest Goosebumps book in the original series at 139 pages.
The book provides examples of:
- And I'm the Queen of Sheba: When Max goes invisible again, and tells April that the mirror made him do it, she scornfully replies, "Yeah. Right. And I'm going to fly to Mars in a flying saucer tonight after dinner."
- And I Must Scream: Those who use the invisibility mirror too much are phased into another dimension forever while their counterparts take over their life.
- Annoying Younger Sibling: Lefty, as is traditional in Goosebumps, largely lives to annoy Max.
- Artifact Collection Agency: Discussed. When Max calls Erin over the phone about the mirror, she suggests that they bring it to the science fair at school to amaze the audience and win first prize. But Max counters that if they do that, the government would easily find out, and take it away to study it.
- A Birthday, Not a Break: Max discovers the magic mirror on his birthday while hanging out with his invited friends in the attic.
- The Bad Guy Wins: A horrifying early example for this franchise. Mirror-Lefty completely replaces his human counterpart, destroys the invisibility mirror, trapping the real Lefty permanently. And poor Max is the only one who knows the truth, so the doppelganger is free to do whatever he wants unopposed.
- Cassandra Truth: A rare example of this happening to an adult side-character. The Thompsons' neighbor sees some floating tomatoes juggled by an invisible Zack. He runs to tell his wife, but Zack stops juggling and she just thinks the poor man's delusional. And since the mirror is destroyed by the end, he'll never know for sure if he wasn't.
- Chekhov's Gun: Lefty's baseball. Early on he is tossing it around and he is warned that he'll break a mirror with it. In the end, this is exactly what he does to defeat the mirror people.
- Competition Freak: It's Zack who wants to see who can stay invisible the longest, which leads to the horror of the book.
- Counting Sheep: After getting invisible for the first time, Max is in bed a few nights later and is trying to get to sleep. He even tries the trope name technique, but to no avail. So he decides to sneak around and investigate the mirror.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Your kids discover something real cool, something that gives you an otherworldly high and "makes you invisible", but even if your kid wants to eventually stop his friends keep pressuring him to continue and they all keep doing it and doing it until they're sucked into a lifeless world and seemingly replaced with a cold zombie-like counterpart… it's easy to see the story as a metaphor for adolescent drug addiction.
- Downer Ending:The mirror is shattered and the doppelgangers seemingly vanquished...until Max realizes Lefty is using his right hand, because he's been replaced with a mirror double. His brother is in a hellish dimension while this evil duplicate is living his life. And now that the mirror's been destroyed, there is nothing he can do about it. When the book was adapted for television, the mirror re-assembles itself, which reduces the bleakness of the ending by giving Lefty some hope that he would be rescued one day.
- Exact Words: When Max's mother is looking at Zack's new haircut, which is buzzed off on one side, she states that it looks "interesting". Max notes to himself that she is only using that word to be polite and she disapproves of it, and he thinks that if he got a haircut like that, she would kill him.
- Fate Worse than Death: Trapped in the mirror realm forever while your reversed doppelganger takes over your life.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The mirror and its connected lightbulb at first just seems to pull off a supernatural trick of turning people who turn on the light invisible that in fact turns out to be a portal to a parallel universe where one is usurped by their cold-hearted doppleganger if they stay invisible too long and get sucked into the mirror.
- I Meant to Do That: When walking through the attic, Lefty accidentally drops the softball he was holding and it rolls across the floor, which he trips over and does a Face Plant. He gets back up, and says this trope word for word.
- Invisibility: Courtesy of the mirror.
- Lying Finger Cross: When Max makes the others promise not to use the mirror again, he catches a fleeting glance of Lefty doing this, much to his unease. And after he recovers an invisible Lefty from pulling a prank and scolds him, he tries to bring this up as an excuse, but Max is having none of it.
- Magic Mirror: It makes you invisible.
- Mirror Monster: The mirror not only turns you invisible, if you stay invisible too long, your reflection — the Mirror Monster in question — forces you to switch places with it.
- My God, You Are Serious!: Max goes invisible for the first time, and is mostly unaware at first, only seeing the looks of horror on his friends and Lefty. They tell him he's gone invisible and they can only hear his voice, but he thinks it's a stupid joke they're playing, and he tells them to stop. But he sees how frightened they are, which slowly convinces him that they're telling him the truth. It's only when he becomes fully visible again, wakes up nights later, and tries it out again, is what fully convinces him.
- No Honor Among Thieves:Mirror!Lefty destroys the mirror, banishing his fellow Doppelgangers forever, so he can take the real Lefty's place on Earth.
- Puppy Love: Max and Erin, though more the former is the one rather open (not publicly) about his crush on the latter and it's not quite known if the feelings are mutual, though their relationship is much more flirtatious than the series usual boy-girl pairings in the book and him wanting to impress her does figure prominently in moving the supernatural side of the story forward as well.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The mirror is hidden behind a false wall in the attic, and rightfully so.
- Tickle Torture: While showing Zack he's invisible, Max tickles him as he's in the process. This naturally freaks him out.
- And when Lefty tricks the two into thinking he's invisible, the two boys angrily wrestle him which includes this technique.
- Trap Door: Zack sees Max seemingly disappear into thin air, and somehow wonders if he used a trap door for this as a trick, and looks under the floor to try and find one. But Max continues his antics which convinces Zack that he's actually invisible.
- Wham Line: The final line of the book. "[Lefty] was throwing right-handed."
