Trick or ...Trapped!

Give Yourself Goosebumps Special Edition #7

by R.L. Stine

You're trick-or-treating in a rich new neighborhood. But the big trick here is staying alive! If you go to the red house, you're met by scary little elves. At the yellow house may end up with a jack-o'-lantern for a face!

Genres: Horror, Gamebooks, Childrens, Fiction, Choose Your Own Adventure, Thriller

Library Binding

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Robert Lawrence Stine known as R. L. Stine and Jovial Bob Stine, is an American novelist and writer, well known for targeting younger audiences. Stine, who is often called the Stephen King of children's literature, is the author of dozens of popular horror fiction novellas, including the books in the Goosebumps, Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, The Nightmare Room and Fear Street series.

R. L. Stine began his writing career when he was nine years old, and today he has achieved the position of the bestselling children's author in history. In the early 1990s, Stine was catapulted to fame when he wrote the unprecedented, bestselling Goosebumps® series, which sold more than 250 million copies and became a worldwide multimedia phenomenon. His other major series, Fear Street, has over 80 million copies sold.

Stine has received numerous awards of recognition, including several Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards and Disney Adventures Kids' Choice Awards, and he has been selected by kids as one of their favorite authors in the NEA's Read Across America program. He lives in New York, NY.

http://us.macmillan.com/itsthefirstda...

Reviews

[Kathrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

How many choices do we have to make before I can say I have "read" this book to my son? No one expects choose-your-own to reach literature status, or even boast of good plot construction or character development. But it will keep an easily-distractible 7-year-old engaged in an attempt to prolong storytime as long as possible. Does everyone read these the same way? First, you make all the choices you think are the "right" ones to keep your character alive and through as many plot points as possible. Then you go back and make "bad" choices to count how many ways your character can suffer and die. Sometimes you think you've made "right" choices, and your character is confronted with a quick but "happy" ending. But it's still an ending, which feels a lot like death, anyway, so then the "right" choice becomes the "wrong" one. And sometimes I feel cheated at how many times I'm not allowed to make a choice.
Note to parents: Avoid the white mansion if you happen to be suffering a raging headache and have to get up at 5:30 in the morning. Blue house = home free. Wish I'd known.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first word that comes to my mind when I think of the book Trick Or Trapped from the Give Yourself Goosebumps series is finally.This book felt like it took so long to finish and it wasn't necessarily hard to get all the endings.It was hard to navigate and I hate when these books are like this because it seems way more harder than it has to be. The endings weren't hard to get.The good endings weren't hard to get. It was just some choices were inside of choices. I literally had four bookmarks at one point in this book.But like I said. Finally,I finished this thing. The story starts off with you going trick or treating ,or getting ready to go trick or treating and meeting your friends after doing homework and a bunch of house chores. You run into this kid named Nathan, who is this nerdy kid you know at school.He tells you about this place that has a buttload of candy.It's inside this fenced in rich neighborhood looking place. And you decide to take his word for it.Inside this fenced-in area the gate closes and you get a choice of I think five houses to go to.After each of the five houses you go to ,they either lead you to a good ending,bad ending, or lead you to the main house,which is this big white house that overlaps all of these other houses. I'll try to go over each of the mini houses but honestly some of these blend in really good with each other.You get the red house which takes you to a Halloween party that even has Santa Claus. Inside you the blue house you got this weird doppelganger family that could have been elaborated a little bit more. You have a orange house that has this mad scientist guy that has a pet gorilla.If you go to the yellow house you somehow end up in a winter wonderland. If you go to a green house you have to deal with this weird captain guy that's either a dentist or a really creepy Baker. But if you somehow managed to get through all of those houses you'll end up at the White House, not THE White House, but a White House full of rooms you can explore while being chased by a monster.I do like why the monster was created and who created it.I can't reveal that because it's kind of a spoiler.it does get repetitive pretty quick though.In fact a lot of the endings in this book were very repetitive. They all felt the same at times.I literally looked at two or three endings and couldn't remember if I got that ending or not because it felt so similar to the other ones. I liked the exploring of the houses but they could have been a little longer, especially the blue house one. The blue house could have used a little bit more explanation on why these people are here.My favorite ending of this book was probably the Santa Claus ending ,and it even got spoiled for me a little bit and I still liked it the most .One thing I will complain about too is even though this book has a lot to do with candy and it has vampires and a Halloween party.It still somehow manages not to feel like a Halloween book. I feel like this book could have been any Give Yourself Goosebumps book. There's no mention of jack-o'-lanterns that I can remember.And there's a lot of tropes that I was really looking forward to. Other than that I give Trick Or Trapped a three out of five stars.I heard this book was pretty bad, or I feel like I've heard that this book was pretty bad, but I think it was just okay.The navigation was the weakest point for me and the lackluster endings.But I still think it had a decent concept and was fun in certain parts.

[Josiah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is easily one of the best Power Play special editions that I've read in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series. The story is a lot of fun to go through whether by oneself or taking the adventure along with others, and the action is plotted very well and rises to the level of real suspense on several occasions. Best of all, author R.L. Stine has impressively captured the chaotic feel that tends to surround most of the very best gamebooks, that feeling that anything at all can happen depending on the choices that you make, as if the story is writing itself as you are reading and there are no limitations to where you can take it. No other form of literature can completely match that feeling.

You begin on Halloween night, running to make up for lost trick-or-treating hours after a trying evening at home. When you take a shortcut to catch up with your friends more quickly, you observe a huge gated community by the roadside in a location where you could have sworn there was no such community. Sunshine Court is the name of the housing development, a nerdy kid you know from school named Nathan comes up and tells you. He goes on to say that Sunshine Court beats all other neighborhoods in the area for pure quantity and quality of Halloween candy, and you should definitely go there to do your trick-or-treating. Of course, you take his advice; to not do so isn't even presented as an option! However, you may wish you had passed on the mysterious new neighborhood before the night has finished.

As random as certain elements of the story may seem, it's actually constructed very neatly. The five colored houses that you can go to as you first enter Sunshine Court act almost as gateways to the featured section of the narrative. Yes, you can die in any one of the colored houses if you're not careful, or even reach a final good ending if you make just the right choices, but more often than not your experience in the colored houses will funnel you toward a final encounter in the big white mansion that Nathan had told you about when you met him at the beginning, and this is where the greatest dangers and most thrilling suspense of all await. Gruesome death will not hesitate to reach up and snare your feet should you make even a slightly miscalculated decision once you've entered inside the white mansion, but there are also plenty of good endings out there, too, if you keep your cool through the fear and continue to make logical (and occasionally lucky) choices.

There are some really good sub-stories in this book: the polar bear that acts as your guide through the arctic, or your mad dash through the exotic jungle that you suddenly find yourself in the midst of after ducking into the steam room in an attempt to flee from a horrible creature called only The Thing, or the two confusing mad scientists who lure you in and try to make you become their latest unwilling experiment. The storytelling and feeling of suspense in Trick Or...Trapped! is achieved more convincingly than in most Give Yourself Goosebumps books, and in spite of a few endings that left me scratching my head, there's a chance that I would give this book two and a half stars. I greatly enjoyed reading it, and I hope that Scholastic (or even some other publishing company) will bring it back into print someday.

[Pulp_Fiction_Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the goosebumps community this book is the holy grail. It is one of the rarest books to find and one of, if not the most expensive. I've been looking for a copy for years to complete my goosebumps collection and was lucky enough to score one for a reasonable price just before Christmas. This was a fun book with some good gameplay and inventory functions, unfortunately it had some issues. The premise is, you work your way through houses trick or treating and have to make your way to a mansion on the hill which serves as a final boss of sorts. So, the first house I entered, the path I followed brought me straight to the mansion. Instead of continuing I decided to go back and choose a different house and low and behold I found a path to the mansion that way too. It was just frustrating as there is a great idea here but the mechanics are all screwed up, if they had got the layout right and plotted it so you had no way of getting to the mansion without hitting all the house (Or you could but would be disadvantaged having not visited them all) this could have been fantastic. I was caught between rating this a three or four star but I read this with my daughter and we had a great time so all in all I'm giving it the win.

[Nader Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the rarest and pricey books in the series ,this had the potential to be something I’d really love, especially since I’m a big fan of anything Halloween related , Unfortunately, it didn’t quite live up to what I hoped for.

I managed to get through all (27) possible endings, and while there were moments that did feel like Halloween , especially with the Red House and the main monster The Thing from the White Mansion, overall the book just felt average.

Some endings were repetitive and a few storylines dragged a bit. I really felt like it could have captured the Halloween spirit much more, it’s supposed to be a “trick-or-treat” story, but only about 30–40% of it truly felt Halloween-themed.

It’s also strange that there’s not a single Jack-o’-lantern in the whole book, but thankfully we get elves, ghosts, pirates, vampires, and of course The Thing.
Fun in parts, but not spooky or seasonal enough for what it’s supposed to be.
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[Alejandro Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

They trick and they trap, and my friends, this book’s kinda crap. Well, it approaches crap at times. But it ain’t complete dog poo, and I actually did enjoy this one unlike some of the more boring or dull GYGs. This ain’t a dull one, no, just not a good one. My favorite thing about this book (if anything) is the concept. Going to this rich neighborhood for Halloween and discovering it’s, well, mad and getting locked in there is a solid idea. You have to trick-or-treat your way out, trying to find someone to help you whilst battling these spooky-kooky ass threats. This combined with the power play aspect is nice. There’s also a slight bit of character given here to a kid named Nathan, which is rare for a GYG of all things. That was neat. And aside from a couple really good endings, the mansion arc having a strong start, and the few genuinely tense moments involving The Thing, this book ain’t good bruh. Biggest negative is just the execution of this concept; what the ghost writer (yes, this one is very clearly ghost-written via every chapter having ten exclamation points) threw in some pretty dog shit ideas. Fake parents, a mad scientist story that’s all-too similar to that one Rob-Zombie porno, and a coca-cola bear origin story all accumulate for some of the stupidest shit I’ve ever read. Not to mention the random medieval and jungle scenes thrown into the better of the two arcs, the mansion arc. Like bruh. And the hanzel and gretel rip off was interesting. Not to mention the jolly red fat fuck shows up lmao. Yeah, there’s some really shit stuff in here. Like I just don’t like what is offered here… it’s just not good. Besides that, there are some genuinely ass endings here and a bunch of mid ones. And there’s a TON of mid endings. And if there’s anything else to dunk on, it’s a random feel. Yes, it’s a GYG. But it’s also a very late GYG, and by the fourth book in this series, they fixed the big issue I had with the first few books: overly random nonsense, more random than usual. And my friends… it’s back. Fuck… also, I dislike the low usage of the power-play aspect. Missed potential there. Anyways, the book gets a 6.5/10, I enjoy it more than books like Professor Shock since at least it ain’t boring but it really suffers from the generally weird contents of the story and the lack of stability in plot. Barely even a Halloween story at times lol. Why can’t the coca-cola bear give me airplane rides home?

[Griffin C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do think that this book is quite overhated however it is not without its flaws. My main issues are that the book seems too random, for the most part, the randomness in the book is fun but at some points it's too much, the yellow and green houses aren't fleshed out, the book puts most of the focus on the red, blue, and orange houses as well as the mansion which isn't too much of an issue I just wish they played larger roles, there isn't enough power play, there are very few instances in this book where items are used. However, the concept is great as well as most parts in the red, orange, and blue houses as well as the mansion. 9/10

[habaneroharlot · Rating 1 out of 5]

In comparison to many of his other books, this one is legitimate trash.
It was embarrassingly easy to read, Disorganized, poorly designed/lazy branching paths, poorly written, text errors everywhere, the plot made little sense, very repetitive in language.

If someone had told me this was a mixture of Al slop + some outsourced dude in India writing it, I'd believe it. On top of it all, the epub I had was broken AF and miserable to read.
Rumor has it that some of his later books were written by ghost writers, and this book makes me honestly believe it.

I read this book to my 7 & 8 year old kids, it wasn't their favorite Goosebumps book either.

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Literally one of the worst gyg books out there and by far the most rare which makes it even more disappointing. Every single route you take will eventually lead to the same place and end the same way. The houses are kinda cool which is the only reason this isn’t 1 star. But overall it’s too far fetched and yea it’s just not on par with the other Gyg books out there. If you’re a collector then for sure get it but if you just want one to read and don’t really care about having them all then pass this one.

[David Bennett Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was great.

[H.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is death by chocolate supposed to be a bad thing . . . ?

[fanboyriot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was okay I liked the two endings I got but for this being a Halloween book it didn’t really feel like it.

[Colton · Rating 3 out of 5]

As one of the Special Edition Give Yourself Goosebumps books, this story has a different structure. Your character must explore five houses and make it to the mansion behind them. Some of the houses have more to do inside than others. The problem with this book is that it's impossible to suspend disbelief enough. Your character will be walking through a hallway and then end up in the arctic or a jungle. Certain events happen that make absolutely no sense and have nothing to do with the main plot (a certain polar bear scene is particularly random). I like the idea, but there were too many stupid and pointless hack-job endings. This book felt like it was being weird for the sake of being weird. I don't know.

[Vincent Chen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is sure to give you chills, with over 2o endings, it will keep you flipping the pages for hours. You are a tricker treater, on halloween night, going to meet your friends when suddenly you meet your nerdy classmate and learn that in sunshine court (a place in your town) is offering a lot of candy to treaters! You go there and choose from 4 houses and one mansion. Good or bad, the ending all depends on your choices, so BE wise and BEware.

[Antonio Caruso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book! Good characters and great story!