YMMV / Shivers (M. D. Spenser)

• Anvilicious: Weirdo Waldo's Wax Museum beats the reader over the head with its themes about the horrors of humanity. This is lampshaded as even the characters start getting tired of Mad Mac's speeches.
• Bizarro Episode: Babyface & the Killer Mob, which is basically a non-horror gonzo comedy in which a boy wakes up in the body of a member of The Family for the Whole Family.
• Complete Monster: Weirdo Waldo's Wax Museum: Mad Mac, The Keeper, is an eldritch entity who owns a Wax Museum Morgue, luring entire families into touring his museum before tormenting his guests psychologically using chilling, lifelike wax displays depicting past atrocities of mankind. Slowly eliminating families throughout the tour, The Keeper has them encased in wax and unable to move, conscious of their surroundings until their deaths, having claimed thousands of victims—including children—over several decades, as revealed when a few older wax statues turn out to contain nothing but powdered bones. When protagonist Billy Miser and his family tries to escape, the Keeper had the family trapped in a sealed room and tries drowning them in boiling wax.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Anthony's slightly skewed beliefs about America (he at one point excitedly asks Paul where they can buy things like grenades and machine guns) in Shriek Home Chicago.
  • The "Mommy, are these heathens?" bit in Weirdo Waldo's Wax Museum.
• Fair for Its Day: While not overtly offensive, some readers may arch their brows at the slightly awkward and inaccurate portrayal of the Native American character in Pool Ghoul, even though he was portrayed sympathetically, as were the unseen Natives in Ghosts of Camp Massacre (the ghostly ones in Terror on Tomahawk Island were depicted as being Ambiguously Evil, though).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In "The Curse of the New Kid", the protagonist's sadistic gym coach, after mocking his poor performance in gym class, threatens him to "make a man out of you when the day is over".
• The Scrappy: Samantha from Ghosts of Camp Massacre due to how much of an Insufferable Genius she is, and how she constantly acts high and mighty to the reader.
• Values Resonance: Ghosts of Camp Massacre has a message about the devastating impact that colonialism can have, a concept that is now extremely common in pop culture.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?:
  • The books were intended for the same age group (preadolescents) as Goosebumps, and while Goosebumps could get dark and violent, Shivers did so somewhat more frequently, while also being much more explicit in its depictions of dark subject matter like murder and gun violence in various books, Native American genocide and historical revisionism in Pool Ghoul and Ghosts of Camp Massacre, filicide in The Thing in Room 601 and A Ghostly Playmate, self-hatred in A Waking Nightmare, grief and loss in The Ghosts of Devil's Marsh, child abuse in Creepy Clothes, and class, racial, and religious persecution (as graphically demonstrated through wax recreations of things like the Atlantic Slave Trade, The Spanish Inquisition, The Holocaust, The Troubles, the Arab–Israeli Conflict, etc.) in Weirdo Waldo's Wax Museum.
  • The series could sometimes get surprisingly sexually suggestive, like when Samantha expresses fear of being attacked by "perverts" in Ghosts of Camp Massacre or when a mother calls her son a "filthy boy" after being told that he has been browsing adult chatrooms and websites with names like "X-Dreams" in Weirdo Waldo's Wax Museum. The Curse of the New Kid is probably the most boundary-pushing book, as it contains a scene in which the protagonist mentions that his parents spend every Friday night locked in their bedroom watching implicitly pornographic videos, and another in which a bully seemingly tries to sexually assault a girl, pinning her against a tree and making lascivious-sounding comments like, "You can have her when I'm through" as the girl cries, "Stop! Stop it! Please! I'll scream. Help! Somebody help!"

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