The Goosebumps book with a whole bunch of dummies.
Trina and Dan's father is a former professional ventriloquist, and still refurbishes and maintains a collection of dummies as a hobby. He's just gotten a new one, which he found in the garbage, which he names Smiley.
Goosebumps fans will immediately recognise that the dummy's real name is Slappy.
When Trina and Dan's cousin, Zane, comes to visit, one of the dummies keeps showing up in his pictures, and the kids get blamed for it. Not to worry, Zane just wanted to get back at Trina and Dan for picking on him when they were younger, and promises to stop pranking them.
But the dummy keeps on appearing when he's not wanted. And tries to strangle Trina in her sleep. Yes folks, Slappy is up to his old tricks once again.
It was adapted into episodes 24 and 25 of the second season of the 1995 TV series.
It was reissued in the Classic Goosebumps line in 2015 as a tie-in to the first movie.
The book provides examples of:
- Book Ends: Slappy gives the first sign of life when Trina reads the spell by winking at her, and he winks at her again as he's carried away by Zane.
- Continuity Nod: This is definitely a sequel to Night of the Living Dummy II given that Trina's father repairs Slappy's head after he got smashed up by Dennis in the previous book's finale.
- Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Amy and her family from Night of the Living Dummy II were pretty wealthy, while Trina and her brother live with in an old creepy wooden house and are definitely poorer, which is why the big dinner party that gets ruined by Slappy and Trina and Dan risking the cancellation of their summer camp holiday by getting framed for all the trouble are a big deal.
- Demonic Dummy: Thirteen of them!
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: As several people, along with the blogger himself, pointed out on the snarky Goosebumps blog
, the Night of the Living Dummy series may be creepy as a child, but as an adult, a completely different layer of creepy reveals itself. The living dummy in question is obsessed with making preteen girls (and it's always girls, never boys in these books) into his slaves. When they refuse, he punches and slaps them — a rare act of physical violence for this series — and knocks one girl unconscious. - Face of a Thug: Rocky, one of the dummies in the attic, is described looking quite threatening. As children Dan loved scaring Trina by voicing Rocky and making him say that at night he's gonna come and get her.
- From Bad to Worse: Subverted and double-subverted. In the final confrontation, Dan decides to read out loud the magic spell that brought Slappy to life thinking it'll make him lifeless again, but instead he awakens all the other dummies of the attic, who eerily get up and march towards them... until it turns out that they're actually circling around Slappy and gang up on him. But then they all play possum when Zane suddenly enters in the attic, sees the pile of dummies and decides to go tell Trina and Dan's father assuming that they were plotting something against him. They get grounded, their summer camp cancelled and now are possibly stuck with a whole attic of living dummies that have dubious intentions.
- Karma Houdini: Zane is never exposed for the misdeeds he did to get Trina and Dan in trouble as revenge for all the times they scared him in previous visits, leaving the two grounded for a very long time for the trouble he (and later Slappy) caused and him with a warm goodbye from his uncle and aunt. That being said, the book ends with him deciding to take up ventriloquism and Trina gifts him Slappy as the dummy he'll use to get started. As he leaves, Slappy winks at Trina, showing he's still alive and most definitely ready to cause trouble for Zane in the near future.
- Red Herring: For most of the book Trina suspects that the sinister-looking dummy Rocky is alive and causing trouble, but then it's revealed that Slappy simply carried him around to purposefully misdirect her.
- Same Plot Sequel: It's not quite the same as Night of the Living Dummy II, but it still follows the basic structure of Slappy causing trouble for which a girl gets blamed, and he is eventually defeated by a friendly dummy.
- Ventriloquism: It's called Night of the Living Dummy, what do you expect?
- Zerg Rush: This is how Slappy gets defeated, when the spell used to bring him to life brings to life all the dummies owned by Trina's dad, who promptly rush after Slappy and kill him.
