Night of the Living Dummy III

Night of the Living Dummy III is a Goosebumps novel by R. L. Stine, published in 1996. It is the third title in the dummy sequence inside the wider Goosebumps series.

The setting is domestic and specific: an attic holding the props from a parent's former career. Trina and her brother Dan live in the house with those dummies stored above them, and the book's opening problem is auditory, since they hear voices from a place where nobody should be speaking, which is a more contained kind of fear than an intruder. Their father's abandoned career is the reason the dummies are in the house at all, and the children's first instinct is to explain the sound away rather than to accept it.

The novel's question is stated plainly in the premise: whether the objects are alive. Stine's series returns to this device repeatedly because it lets a short book build dread from an ordinary household object before anything has to happen on the page. Because the voices come from inside the house and from above the children, the threat sits closer than anything in a swamp or a cellar, and the book can spend its length deciding whether anything is moving at all.