The Goosebumps book where a boy ends up stuck in a bee's body.
Gary Lutz has no friends. He's ridiculously clumsy, so all the other kids call him Lutz the Klutz. He's regularly beaten up by a trio of bullies. And the girl he has a crush on cannot take him seriously.
There might just be a way to fix this. Gary finds a company that offers temporary body swaps, so he can switch places with cool kid Dirk Davis for a while. He'll get to live the high life as a popular boy, and maybe pick up some of Dirk's talent. Meanwhile, Dirk gets to absorb some of Gary's math skill. Sounds like a win-win situation, until a bee intrudes on the mind-swap operation. Now Gary is trapped in the bee's body, and the bee in Dirk's body can't be reasoned with. Worse, Dirk is having a great time turning Gary from a loser into a badass, and doesn't want to go back.
It is one of the nineteen original series books that was not adapted into the 1995 TV series.
This book provides examples of:
- Annoying Laugh: Mr. Andretti, the neighbor beekeeper, has this whenever he laughs at Gary. It goes, "Haw haw haw!"
- Artistic License – Biology: A possible case of this. Through his strange new eyesight in his bee form, Gary sees a red-haired girl exit the Person-to-Person building. But the thing is, Gary wouldn't have been able to see that her hair is red, because bees cannot see the color red. However, Gary is telling most of the events of the book in past-tense narration, and he met this girl afterward back in his body with his normal eyesight, so he might have filled in the gap on that one.
- Battle Discretion Shot: One chapter ends with Gary seeing a bully’s fist about to hit him in the face. The next chapter has him in his room bruised.
- Body Horror: A mild version. The horror comes from Gary getting transplanted into a body so much unlike his own, which also happens to be a member of a species he's terrified of.
- Boys Have Cooties: When Gary finally gets back in his human body, he encounters his sister Krissy and excitedly gives her a kiss on the cheek. The disgusted girl wipes her cheek and tells him not to get his cooties on her.
- Bug Buzz: Because he lives next door to a beekeeper, Gary constantly goes through this. And when he actually becomes one, he gets caught and sent to the beehive, and the constant drone of bees buzzing drives him insane to the point that he bangs his body against the wall trying to get out.
- Butt-Monkey: Gary is arguably the biggest one in Goosebumps, and that's really saying something.
- Cats Are Mean: Claus, Gary's sister's cat, shows nothing but aggression to him whenever he's around. The cat later even tries to kill the random bee that Gary was stuck in.
- Clothing-Concealed Injury: When Gary is first beaten up by bullies, he tries to hide the bruises that are mostly on his arms by wearing a sweater, even though it was summer. And when he gets injured again in a bike collision, which results in scratches on his face, he attempts to do it again, but decides that there is no use.
- Cruel Twist Ending: Averted; this book is one of the very few Goosebumps books without this and ends rather happily despite Gary retaining some of the traits of the bee, which seem harmless.
- Covers Always Lie: In-story, the bee's body never transforms to look like Gary's at any point.
- Description in the Mirror: Gary is described in this manner.
- Didn't Think This Through: While flying around his house in bee form, Gary sees his sister, Krissy, and tries to fly over to her to tell her about his predicament. He realizes too late that to her, it looks just like a bee that's going straight towards her. This results in her getting freaked out, and she chases him trying to hit him with a flyswatter.
- Dreadful Dragonfly: Played With. While flying around as a bee, Gary comes across a dragonfly, and thinks that it's charging at him to attack him. But it turns out, it was only just passing by Gary.
- Dull Surprise: When Krissy notices a bee, really Gary in a different body, her reaction is, "Oh, great. One of Andretti's bees got in our house." Gary himself is surprised how calm she seems. But when he flies over to greet her, she screams so loud that Gary expected the kitchen window to break.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Perennial loser Gary Lutz goes through quite an ordeal in the body of a bee, but manages to go back into his original body, and after all he went through, things change for him, becoming much more well liked and making friends for the first time ever. He still kept some traits from the bee he was stuck in, but it's shown to be pretty harmless.
- Fiction Isn't Fair: A pretty egregious example. Gary Lutz goes to some body switching service to get his mind put in a cool kid's body but it gets put in a bee's body by mistake. When Gary (in bee form) finally contacts the company, they say the other kid refuses to give up the his body and there's nothing they can do. While body switching isn't real, if it were, It's safe to say that if someone refused to give your body back the cops would track them down just as if someone borrowed your car and wouldn't give it back. Not to mention Gary's parents could sue the company's ass off for making such a horrendous mistake in the first place.
- Forced Transformation: The book deals with this trope throughout, as Gary engages in a faulty body-swap with a bee instead of another human.
- Foreshadowing: When trying to escape Claus as a bee, Gary considers stinging him... but then remembers that bees die after they sting someone or something. When he does ultimately use his stinger, on his own body, it's what sends the trio of body-switchers all back to where they belong.
- "Freaky Friday" Flip: The story deals with the aftermath of a faulty one, when Gary ends up in the body of a bee instead of the cool boy he intended on.
- Gang of Bullies: Barry, Marv and Karl, who beat up Gary together.
- Gender Bender:
- Couples with
Fridge Horror, as it's not explicitly stated in the book, but when Gary is transformed into a worker bee, the realization comes that all worker bees are female. - Additionally, Karmen tells Gary he can switch bodies with a girl if he wants. He has no reaction to this but is likely fine with the option, just isn't interested.
- Couples with
- Humanity Ensues: Thanks to it accidentally getting in the body-switching machine, a bee's mind ends up in a human body, leaving the poor thing utterly confused.
- Humiliation Conga: The story features a long-suffering protagonist who experiences various lengths of Body Horror.
- Impossible Pickle Jar: Gary is asked by his mother to open up a jar of peanut butter as she needs it to make a recipe. Gary struggles, but cannot open it. That is when his younger sister comes along, takes the jar, and opens it easily. This causes her and their mother to start laughing, much to Gary’s humiliation.
- Lame Pun Reaction: When catching Gary as a bee in his net, Mr. Andretti calls him and the other bees in the net "my honeys." While he laughs and says that it was a good one, Gary thought it was stupid.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Dirk wants to cheat in summer school by switching bodies with someone who can pass his math tests for him. And then he ends up deciding to keep Gary's body. Karma hits him hard at the end — after he gets sent back to his original body, he found out that his attempt to cheat failed miserably: his temporary substitute, the bee Gary switched with, flunked all his math tests.
- No Name Given: The red-haired girl that is only shown twice in the book is unnamed.
- No, You: After kissing Krissy, Gary's disgusted sister calls him a creep. He in turn calls her a creep, with them volleying the word back and forth at each other.
- Nose Shove: When trying to wake Dirk (in Gary's human body) up, Gary in bee form goes so far as to stick one of his little bee legs up his nose, "Gary" kept on sleeping.
- Not Afraid of You Anymore: When Dirk is able to beat up Barry, Marv, and Karl while in Gary’s body, this makes the three afraid of him and promise that they will not pick on him again. Gary is overjoyed at this.
- Not Quite Back to Normal: Downplayed, Gary is back in his human body, yet he still retains his addiction to sucking pollen from flowers. The book ends with him excusing himself to suck one.
- The Prankster: Gary's adult neighbor, Mr. Andretti, who loves to scare him with bees, knowing he's afraid of them.
- Puppy Love:
- Gary has a big crush on Kaitlin and agrees to go through with the body-switch partly in order to impress her.
- He also forms a bond at the end of the story with a red-haired girl who he saw in the human-transferring business. Whether it's platonic or romantic, Gary doesn't say.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: When Gary is asked by his father what happened to him after seeing his bruised face, he replies that he got into a collision with his bike. Mrs. Lutz says that it's probably those Gang of Bullies whom keep harassing him. Yes, they did beat up Gary earlier that day, but this isn't the reason Gary got bruised this time.
- Scary Stinging Swarm: Gary is very afraid of this happening. Towards the end, he actually leads such a swarm into his bedroom, to confront the boy who's taken over his body.
- Shown Their Work: The facts that Gary read about bees and the experiences he encountered as a bee are actually correct. Bees do in fact lose their stingers and die if they sting something, bees will dance for others to let them know where honey is, etc.
- Stronger Sibling: Gary even admits that his little sister could beat him up.
- Stupid Sacrifice: Near the end, Gary stings Dirk (in Gary's body) on the nose, but soon realizes he forfeited his own life just to annoy Dirk.
- Whole-Plot Reference: The plot — a male character tries to use a machine only for an insect to get in the way and cause the character to turn into a human-insect hybrid. Sound familiar?
