In Ghost Beach, Jerry and Terri go to a secluded community in the woods to spend the summer at their cousins' cabin. Their cousins who have white hair and are decades older than them? I thought that was really weird. Does that happen in real life? Anyway. Jerry discovers a cave down by the beach just outside the forest, and the cave is haunted! And they meet some creepy local kids, and find a creepy graveyard in the forest. But how is it all connected? What mystery might be lying beneath the surface? Can the rhyming protagonists discover the nature of the evil ghost that lives in the cave and escape his wrath?
This one was pretty mediocre. On the plus side, I liked the ghost aspect of the story, and there were some genuinely scary moments in this book, even for an adult. The setting was also interesting; there's a mysterious cave on a rocky beach, in a secluded area, with graveyards and one or two cabins nestled in a creepy forest. I really liked all of that. I also liked the initial mystery of the ghost, trying to figure out who or what the ghost was, and the mystery behind the cemetery tombstones all having the same family name. Those things were genuinely interesting and kept me invested early on in the book, before everything fell apart so completely in the second half.
As for things I didn't like. I mean, Terri and Jerry are the protagonists' names. Seriously? And Jerry is a protagonist name Stine already used at least once in a previous Goosebumps book earlier in the series, Piano Lessons Can Be Murder. It seems ridiculous to me that of all the names out there he reused a protagonist name in two separate books that aren't even ten books apart in the series (Piano Lessons Can Be Murder is book number 13 and Ghost Beach is book number 22). That just seems really lazy to me, and further illustrates how all of Stine's protagonists are really just cookie-cutter copies of each other; they all seem to look and act the same, and now they even have the same names.
And this is now at least the second time where I've seen Stine use these lazy "rhyming protagonist" names in a Goosebumps book. In The Beast from the East two of the three protagonists were named Nat and Pat. And now Terri and Jerry. I mean c'mon Stine. Just try for once, with one of these books. Just try. It's really not that hard to make up character names.
And then there was the bizarre reveal by Stine of the true identity of the ghost, with one piece of basically damning evidence, and then Stine seemingly realizing he had several dozen more pages to write, so he went to great lengths to convince the reader that the identity of the ghost was still up in the air, except the doubt he was trying to sow didn't convince me for a second? And so when he doubled back at the end and was like "Actually it's what I said the first time! That's who the ghost is! Surprise!" it wasn't a plot twist at all? It was just cringe-worthy and a bit embarrassing, frankly.
It's also the most predictable book I've read in recent years, and has an absolutely horrific, unbelievably lazy ending that reads as if Stine just wanted the book to be over and so just barfed out a zero-star ending in less than a single page, and that was the end of the book.
This one has its moments, some of which genuinely scared me (which is more than I can say for 90% of these books so far), but overall I still didn't enjoy reading it. It completely fell apart, especially at the very end, as many Goosebumps books sadly do, and there just isn't enough to like when weighed against all the things wrong with it. It's an okay entry, but for me it was a disappointment.
CAWPILE rating:
Characters: 6.0
Atmosphere / Setting: 6.5
Writing Style: 4.5
Plot: 3.0
Intrigue: 5.8
Logic / Relationships: 4.0
Enjoyment: 5.0
= 34.8 total
÷ 7 categories = 4.97 out of 10
= 3 stars