The Give Yourself Goosebumps book that takes place at sea.
You and your friend are on a cruise to Japan, with your parents. A fellow passenger says that people are doing experiments on the boat that are causing passengers to turn into fish-like creatures and he is therefore going to blow the ship up.
You have to choose between telling the captain about the bomb threat and jumping off in order to get away from the explosion. If you and Glenn follow the passenger, you see the results of some of the experiments and have to defeat the one in charge of the operation. If the ship blows up, you meet a group of new friends and you all have to work together to survive.
Ship of Ghouls provides examples of:
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Both storylines have this type of character:
- The helpful and friendly Mrs. Bass in the first storyline turns out to be the mastermind of the mutation experiments being performed on unwilling humans, and the moment you help her, she turns on you immediately.
- The second storyline ends with you being stuck on a life-raft with four other survivors your age — quiet Hal, tomboyish Judy, friendly Steve and Bob, the eldest who makes himself de-facto leader. While the rest of the group are mostly uninterested in chit-chatting due to their predicament, Steve however is willing to crack jokes and offer encouraging words to lighten the mood, as well as trying to bring a more optimistic atmosphere to the survivors. After days adrift in the ocean, suddenly the survivors starts going missing; firstly Hal, and then Judy, at which point Steve claims that he saw a sea-ghost who demand sacrifices from the survivors. If you, Steve and Bob made it to dry land after several uneasy days and sleepless nights, Steve immediately sells out both of you to a hostile tribe, at which point you deduced the truth — it was Steve who killed Hal and Judy, lied about seeing a vengeful ghost, and he intends to eliminate you next if the lifeboat hadn't reached dry land.
- Cassandra Truth: The first storyline where you encounter a passenger, who claims he intends to blow up the ship for knowing it's dark secrets... namely, the vessel being used by an evil syndicate who performs experiments on kidnapped passengers turning them into sea-mutants. Of course you don't believe him, but after reporting him to the ship's captain, you find out he's telling the truth, and now the ship's crew are hunting you for knowing too much.
- Deadly Distant Finale: In one of the conclusion of the stuck-at-sea subplot, you end up stranded on an island inhabited by hostile natives, and you can choose to prove your worthiness to the tribespeople... at which point you are welcomed to becoming a member of their tribe. You ultimately never returned to civilization, marrying a native man/woman, have children, and lives with the tribes for a few decades until the island is destroyed in a volcano eruption. ALL these happen in two short paragraphs, by the way.
- Face–Heel Turn: You can join the real mad scientist, in which you two become really good golfers.
- Failure Is the Only Option: even if you get one of the good endings, you never actually get to go to Japan.
- Flare Gun: In the stranded-at-sea subplot, you and your fellow castaways find one of these in the life raft, which you can use to hunt a whale or save it to signal for help at a passing plane. The latter choice incidentally leads to a good ending where you and the two remaining survivors, Steve and Bob, gets rescued,
- Half-Human Hybrid: The first storyline where the cruise ship turns out to be a front for conducting illicit experiments on kidnapped passengers, turning them into half-human, half-sea creature mutants, will have you encountering plenty of these abominations. Notably, the mad passenger who threatens to blow up the ship ends up being captured alive and turned into a turtle with a human head, while you end up being hunted by two hungry lobster-men in a boiler room.
- Heroic Dolphin: The subplot where you get stranded at sea have a good ending where you are rescued by a herd of dolphins. You then decide to be a marine researcher as you grow up.
- Honesty Is the Best Policy: You can hitch a ride from a passing foreign ship after being stranded at sea... only to discover the ship is a smuggling vessel. When the crew becomes suspicious of you, you can confess that you knew their secrets, or lie that you found nothing. If you are honest, they then leave you stranded in an atoll... where you get rescued by friendly dolphins, reaching a good ending. If you claim you didn't find anything, days later the smuggling ship gets caught by authorities from a non-English speaking country, and due to communication issues, you are unable to convince the arresting ship that you aren't with the smugglers, and end up being thrown to jail with everybody else.
- I Am a Humanitarian: One of the worst endings of the first subplot have you failing to stop Mrs. Bass and her underlings from converting all the passengers, including you and your friend, into sea creature mutants, with you becoming a human-shrimp hybrid. It's implied that Mrs. Bass — despite being revealed to be a sea creature hybrid herself — then had you for dinner, with a side of tartar sauce.
- Irony: The stranded-at-sea subplot have you and the survivors staving off starvation by eating raw fish, for days. There is a good ending where you managed to summon a plane via Flare Gun, and subsequently get rescued, but since you never made it to Japan, your parents decide to treat you to a sushi dinner instead.
- Karma Houdini: A subplot involves you being caught in a shipwreck and ending up in a lifeboat with four survivors; Hal, Judy, Steve and Bob. After spending days adrift in the ocean, low on water and food supply, Steve, the friendliest member of the survivors who turns out to be a Manipulative Bastard, starts eliminating the survivors, firstly Hal and then Judy, and intends to do you next. While you may survive Steve's betrayal and end up adrift alone for the rest of the story, unfortunately precisely none of the endings involves Steve receiving any sort of comeuppance.
- Lost at Sea: During the secondary story in, you escape a bombed cruise ship, and must survive out in the ocean for days on end.
- Meaningful Name: Who knew the lady named Mrs. Bass turns out to be an aquatic-themed villain? Whose crimes invole turning humans into sea creature mutants to populate her private underwater paradise? The same thing can be said for her dragon, Fisher.
- Misanthrope Supreme: Mrs. Bass from the first storyline, who turns out to be a Mad Scientist leading a syndicate that abducts humans, forcefully transforming them into sea creature mutants, and use them to populate her ideal underwater empire. Her reason being that "humans are worthless life forms and sea creatures are superior"... she even commands her own army of brainwashed mutant passengers, and forces you to join her ranks.
- Morton's Fork: Being reasonable in a book about trying to stop a mad scientist's plot to experiment on a cruise ship you are on and trying to escape with your friend gets you stranded in the ocean after managing to get to the outer decks, all because gave you a friendly slap on the back, causing your cable lubricant-soaked body to barrel over the railing and into the sea. The other choices make you kickstart the plot by reporting the only person capable of stopping the conspiracy.
- Never Trust a Title: There are no ghouls in, either on the ship or elsewhere. The closest you'll get are mutant fish creatures.
- Nice Guy: Steve appears to be one during the stranded-at-sea subplot, being the friendliest of the four survivors, even breaking up a fight between you and Bob at one point. They keyword is appears...
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: This comes up twice
- Reporting the Mad Scientist who loudly and hammily announces to you that HE IS GOING TO BLOW UP THIS SHIP!! gets his head ripped off and placed on a giant turtle by the real villain, another mad scientist. He is not amused at you when you encounter him again, and would beat you up if he weren't a giant turtle.
- If you and your friend manage to climb up an empty elevator shaft, you get up to the deck, both covered in grease. He slaps your back in a friendly "you-did-it" way. Unfortunately, you being covered in grease, you accidentally go over the railing and into the water, with no way up as the ship sails into the horizon. Oops.
- Parental Neglect: An extreme example, where your parents leave you and a friend, both ostensibly 10-12 years old (the target audience of the books) alone on a cruise for two weeks, with the approval of your friend's parents.
- Rescue Equipment Attack: The Cruise Ship storyline ends with you getting your hands on the ship's emergency extinguisher and witnessing Woolfe and Ms. Bass, trying to kill each other and you're given the choice of helping either the shifty-looking Woolfe or the friendly Ms. Bass by blasting the extinguisher on the other.
- Threatening Shark: As seen on the cover. One bad ending in the stranded-at-sea plot have you and the fellow lifeboat survivors getting devoured by a shark.
- Viewers Are Goldfish: The lost at sea plot mentions a miniature a magnet that you used to create a substitute compass to find your way back home. By this point, most readers forgot about the part when you grabbed the magnet, so the book referenced the page where you picked it up.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The mad scientist who wants to blow up the entire ship, including all her passengers, because he's trying to stop the ship's crew from further abducting innocent passengers as experimental subjects.
- With Friends Like These...: When everyone's evacuating the bombed cruise ship, if you decide to swim hundreds of yards away to reach your best friend instead of getting into a lifeboat that's much closer, he tells you to go away, because your added weight on the plank he's hanging onto would make both of you sink. He's not wrong, despite his selfishness, though his choice to reject you causes you to drown.
- Would Hurt a Child: Namely, the ship's crew. They are perfectly fine with kidnapping you and turning you into a shrimp-human hybrid for knowing their secrets.
