The Beast from the East is a Goosebumps book about an Absurdly High-Stakes Game.
Ginger Wald and her twin brothers Nat and Pat are lost in a bizarre part of the woods.
Soon they encounter a group of large, furry creatures playing a strange variation of tag, and are forced to join in themselves.
The penalty for losing? Their lives!
It is one of the nineteen original series books that was not adapted into the 1995 TV series, likely because the show didn't have the necessary special effects budget. There was an event based on it in Goosebumps HorrorTown.
The book provides examples of:
- Absurdly High-Stakes Game: If you're "the Beast from the East" when the sun goes down, you're dinner.
- Actually Pretty Funny: When the Beasts tell Ginger and Nat that the game ends when the sun sets behind the Gulla tree, Ginger asks what tree is that on what edge of the woods. This causes the Beasts to laugh, which disturbs her.
- Affably Evil: The creatures just see it as an elaborate game and outside of that are quite friendly.
- Analogy Backfire: Ginger does this to herself at one point. When she first sees one of the Beasts eat a gourd, she is happy to see that they eat fruit, and she assumes at first that all wild animals ate either meat, or fruits and vegetables. But she suddenly remembered that bears would eat both. Indeed, she quickly learns that the Beasts themselves are omnivores.
- Angry Fist-Shake: Ginger does this trope to Nat after he spits on her from high up a tree.
- Batman Gambit: Ginger finds Spork, one of the Beasts, and tags him, but she didn't do it in the eastern direction, so it doesn't count. So, Ginger asks him to play one of her games called "Freeze Frame", which he does. But she did this to lead him in the eastern direction, and when she yells "Freeze!" when he gets there, that's when she tags him and he is actually It.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Mr. Wald, exasperated with the twins and their antics, tells Ginger to take them around the forest and try to lose them. This would all come much too true...
- Calvinball: The "beasts" play a very warped version of "Hide and Seek" in which the rules are either made up as they go along, or so incredibly loosely defined that it just seems that way.
- Chekhov's Gag: One of the twins (Nat) likes to climb trees, and later on they try to climb a tree to see if they can spot a beast to tag.
- Child Eater: The beasts are all too eager to eat Ginger when she loses the game, as well as her brother for being her "helper".
- Counting to Three: An interesting variation occurs. When Ginger finally tags a Beast, they give her a head start by telling her that she has until the count of "trel", then they run after her.
- Creepy Cave: The Hiding Cave. It is quite dark in there, and is utterly infested with insects. Ginger feels quite overwhelmed being in there, and once she and her brother are done using it, they do not hesitate to get out of there.
- Cutting the Knot: When Nat gets a penalty, he is placed in a cage and has to obtain a certain objective to unlock it. Instead, he simply breaks apart the weak boards in the cage and frees himself.
- Deadly Game: The game that is played in this book, and the punishment for being It is to be devoured by the other players at a barbecue, which includes helpers for the person who is It. Not only that, but a player can also get eaten when found on a "free lunch square" as well as being placed in a cage to be eaten when the game is over as punishment for touching the "penalty rock".
- Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: When Nat sees a large boulder with a peculiar hole in it, he reaches his finger to touch it. Ginger warns him not to do so, but this encourages him to do it even more. And when he does it, the boulder lights up and explodes, with the Beasts emerging from smoke. This turned out to cause a penalty for Nat, and he gets locked in a cage for easily being fooled by this Schmuck Bait.
- Eldritch Location: The part of the woods where the Wald siblings find the beasts. All the plants are weird shapes and colors, and the beasts even refer to a path that leads back to "your world". It's possible that the game even takes place in another dimension.
- Exact Words: At the end of the book, when the Beasts are convinced that the children are Level Three players and shouldn't be in this game, they ask them why they didn't tell them sooner. Ginger, taking advantage of this so she and her brothers can get out of being barbecued and eaten, tells Fleg that they didn't want to play, but the Beasts wouldn't listen.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Ginger and Pat are trying to stay away from the Beasts so they don't get tagged, and they come across a place in the woods called the Hiding Cave, where they could hide.
- Fantastic Flora: The strange woods are full of this. There are trees as big as skyscrapers and bushes that are purple.
- Foreshadowing: Upon surveying a tree that Nat wants to climb to be a lookout for Beasts to tag, Ginger observes that this tree looked strong, strong enough to hold Nat. Indeed, when he climbs up it, the tree does hold Nat... menacingly.
- Giant Footprint Reveal: Ginger is quite flummoxed to see her foot standing inside a giant footprint on the ground that is three times the size of her boot. Immediately after this, she gets her first sight of a large Beast coming into the clearing.
- Growling Gut: At the barbecue fire, in which the Beasts plan on barbecuing the Wald children, Ginger at first thought she heard thunder. But she soon realized that it was just the sound of the Beasts' stomachs growling.
- Hand Gagging: Ginger does this trope to herself when she is about to scream because of hundreds of bugs crawling all over her as she is trying to hide from the Beasts.
- Here We Go Again!: Ginger and her brothers escape the game when they think Nat and Pat are one person with the power of self-duplication, marking them as a Level Three player, outranking Fleg and his crew (who are only Level One). Then a beast who blocks the path that they are trying to go through turns out to also be a Level Three player, and tags Ginger.
- Identical Twin Mistake: Ginger says that people constantly do this with Nat and Pat, because they are identical twins and wear Coordinated Clothes. This also occurs as a plot point later on, as Pat gets scared by a squirrel in a tree and runs off, to which he disappears for a significant amount in the book. But when Nat ends up locked up for breaking a rule, Ginger bumps into what she believes is him, thinking that he escaped. But it was actually Pat, having found her.
- Instantly Proven Wrong: When surveying the weird forest and the dangers it contains, Nat notices the squirrel/rabbit mix from earlier, and he believes that this creature is at least not dangerous. But he then goes to pet it, to which it nearly bites his finger off with its sharp teeth, much to his shock.
- Insane Troll Logic: When the three lost protagonists feel a rumbling in the ground, Nat says that it must be their father. Ginger even lampshades this; while their dad may be big and strong, there was no way he could make the ground shake when he walks.
- Ironic Nursery Rhyme: The whole situation reminds Ginger of the song "The Teddy Bear's Picnic".
- Mix-and-Match Critters: The beasts look like a mix between bears, gorillas, and beavers. Also, a helpful squirrel-dog hybrid gives Ginger and Pat a hiding spot at one point. Additionally, Ginger and the twins meet a small creature that is a mix between a squirrel and a rabbit.
- Monstrous Cannibalism: Since the loser of the game gets eaten, we can take a guess at what happens when the loser is a beast and there are no unsuspecting humans playing.
- Mundane Made Awesome: When a living tree catches Nat and attempts to strangle him, what does Ginger do to save him? Have the tree release him by tickling it.
- No Social Skills: The beasts are this to anyone outside of their species who is caught in their game. Outside of the game itself, they seem to have no clue how to act around Ginger and her brothers, and they never even seem to consider that Ginger and her brothers genuinely just stumbled across them and have no idea how to play their bizarre and deadly game of tag.
- One, Two, Skip a Few: When playing Hide and Seek in the woods, Ginger is It, and has to find her brothers. She started to count to one hundred the regular way, but after she reached thirty, she counted by tens. She didn't want to give Nat and Pat a head start.
- Our Monsters Are Weird: The Beasts, blue-furred creatures with gorilla-like faces.
- Over-the-Shoulder Carry: After the game is over, the Beasts do this to Ginger and Pat, and eventually Nat, to bring them to the barbecue pit. Because the Beasts are so large compared to humans, when a Beast does this to Ginger, she can feel blood rushing to her head, feeling dizzy, and the ground seemed so far away from her.
- Pet the Dog: Ginger and Nat are at one point tangled in snakes that are about to bite, when Fleg (one of the Beasts) comes by. The children plead for him to help get the snakes off of them, to which Fleg obliges by carefully unwrapping the slithery creatures away from them.
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: When asking Fleg to free her and Nat from the snakes' grip, Ginger screams, "Get - them - off. Now!"
- "Ray of Hope" Ending: Ginger gets tagged by a level 3 beast at the end, meaning that the level 3 beasts will be starting a much harder version of the game with her as "it". However, now that the kids know the way back to their camp, they can try to sneak away instead of playing the game, unlike during the first game where they didn't know the way out. The book is narrated in past tense first person perspective by Ginger, and the story never implies Posthumous Narration, so the signs seem to point in favor of them surviving.
- Running Gag: Ginger constantly gets her hands dirtied by multiple colorful substances from the nature around her throughout the book.
- Self-Duplication: As revealed during the climax, this is an ability that level three players have, which they call a Classic Clone. The beasts, apparently unfamiliar with the concept of twins, mistake Nat and Pat for being one person with this power, meaning their game level is higher than that of Fleg and his crew, and the game thus doesn't count so they're free to go.
- Silence, You Fool!: Happens when the three main children are prepared to be eaten by the Beasts, and they try to protest.Nat: I - I don't want to play anymore.
Ginger: Nat, I'm afraid the game is just about over.
Fleg: Quiet! Dinner - stop talking! - Smug Snake: The beasts. They spend the whole day acting as if they're better than the protagonists with more experience in the game (which they technically do), but they tend to act amateurish themselves at times.
- Sure, Let's Go with That: At the barbecue after playing the game in which they lost, Nat and Pat are standing beside each other in front of the Beasts, causing them to believe that the two along with Ginger are Level Three players. Realizing this means that she and her brothers wouldn't have to be eaten due to this, Ginger goes along with this assumption so they could all go home.
- Theme Twin Naming: Ginger's younger twin brothers Nat and Pat, with their rhyming names.
- Threat Backfire: When Ginger and the twins head back to their campsite after managing to get out of the game, they stumble across the path of another Beast. Ginger isn't afraid, and tells him to step aside as she and her brothers are Level Three players. But this causes the Beast to reply that he's a Level Three player as well, and he tags her.
- Tickle Torture: Fleg does this to the snakes to make them release Ginger and Nat. Ginger herself does this trope to a tree that is attacking Nat.
- Title Drop: The name of the book is also the name of the game the beasts are playing, and the official title of whoever is "It".
- The Unreveal: Partway through the book, Ginger starts earning points for things such as getting double snake eyes and getting color on her hands. You'd expect this to be explained later on in the story and for it to lead to something, but we never learn the purpose of the points.
- When Trees Attack: This happens at one point with one of the strange tall trees that Nat climbs all over starts to strangle him. Ginger has to distract the tree in order for it to release him.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Ginger and Nat run into this problem when they get attacked by what at first seems like vines, but are actually snakes, much to their horror. Luckily for them, Fleg comes by and they beg for him to help them get the snakes off, to which he grants their request.
- Wimp Fight: While walking through the woods with Ginger, Nat and Pat start a game of hide-and-seek, and start slapping each other over wanting to be It. Ginger has to intervene and volunteer to be It to break up the fight.
