The Give Yourself Goosebumps book taking place on your 12th birthday.
Your parents are working on your birthday, and while you're looking forward to a fun celebration with your friends in a parent-free house, to your chagrin it turns out your parents hired a birthday entertainer for you to hold a "horror birthday party".
But then, the entertainer of the party, Dr. MacDeath, arrives, and to show that he means business, he turns one of your friends, Sarah, into a human-sized balloon poodle, before forcing you to participate in what will soon be the scariest birthday in your life. There are scavenger hunts, party games, a birthday cake infested with worms, a paintball game played via acid pellets... it will indeed be a birthday to remember — if you survive!
Scary Birthday to You provides examples of:
- Adults Are Useless: Played with in one ending where the lady next door breaks up your birthday party, deciding it's getting out of hand, because your parents asked her to supervise and make sure everyone was safe. Sure, she ruined your party, but at least your parents asked someone to look out for you (whereas in most of the other books they happily sit back and let you wander into danger.)
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Happens in two endings. In one ending, after your birthday has been ruined, you blow out the candles on your cake and wish you could have had a better day — so you get sent back to the start of the book to do the story over again. In another, you're trapped with a sadistic entertainer holding you hostage, so you make a wish to be "as far away from him as possible" which sends you to the middle of a desert.
- Birthday Episode: The entire storyline happens during your birthday party. Specifically, you must survive the entire party thrown by a mad magician.
- A Birthday, Not a Break: It's your birthday, and a madman is out there trying to kill you.
- Died on Their Birthday: It's your birthday, and some of the bad endings you may land on infer that you die.
- Hollywood Acid: The book has an ending where Dr. MacDeath sprays acid over you during a paintball game, resulting in instant death.
- Impossible Task: One of the items you need to get in a scavenger hunt is "blood from a turnip". However, it is possible to get this — Dr. MacDeath even tells you how in one path.
- Monster Clown: Yeah, the birthday entertainer Dr. MacDeath? He brought a few of these as well.
- Non-Standard Game Over: If you choose to talk it out reasonably with the insane entertainer holding you and your friends hostage, you cannot continue because the book says it should have been obvious that there was no way he would ever play fair with you.
- Schrödinger's Gun: In one ending, the creepy birthday entertainer Dr. MacDeath turns out to be just pulling horror-themed pranks on you without meaning any harm. In other subplots, he is actually evil.
- Ungrateful Bitch: Your snotty friend Sarah gets twisted up like a balloon animal by Dr. McDeath. If you manage to return her to normal in one ending, she razzes you out for having hired a clown and walks out on your party with the rest of your guests in tow.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Averted in one situation where the only way to get a good ending is if you choose not to save your friend who's trapped in a ballroom with dancing ghosts. The book tells you it's his own fault for being boring enough to be interested in ballroom dance.
- With Friends Like These...:
- If you volunteer to stay at your house so everyone else can do the scavenger hunt, they leave you behind with Dr. Death with no intentions of coming back. Fortunately, the story doesn't end badly on your end, since you offer Dr. Death to be his assistant for future birthday parties, and he agrees.
- The reader is this trope in one path — your friend is trapped in a ballroom with dancing ghosts because he wanted to learn the waltz from them. You decide that anyone who would actually want to learn the waltz is too boring to be worth saving; and escape on your own, leaving him to die.
