A Shocker on Shock Street

A Shocker on Shock Street is one of the Goosebumps books by R. L. Stine, published by Scholastic in 1995 and written for readers who like their horror short and fast.

Erin Wright and her best friend Marty are devoted to horror films, and the Shocker on Shock Street pictures are their favourites, full of creatures with names like the Toadinator, Ape Face and the Mad Mangler. When the new Shocker Studio theme park opens they go along expecting the usual manufactured scares, and the visit turns strange almost at once: their tram becomes stuck inside the Cave of the Living Creeps, and then they are chased by a group of enormous praying mantises. The joke of the book is that the two of them cannot work out how much of what is happening belongs to the attraction and how much of it is genuinely after them, and the answer is not remotely reassuring.

The series specialised in short horror for younger readers, usually finishing on a twist, and this one plays with the difference between the horror somebody has paid to see and the horror that has decided to chase them instead.