Nightmare Hour: Time For Terror (2000) - Plot & Excerpts
For complete review, check my bookblog, pagebypage-sc.blogspot.com.Nightmare Hour is an anthology of ten short stories by R. L. Stine who is famous for his Goosebumps series. The story-telling style and creepy level in this book is pretty much the same with other Goosebumps books. What you’ll find different is the little insight from Stine where he tells readers about where he gets the idea of each short story. It surprised me how bizarre Stine’s way of thinking must be. I mean, you don’t think about some horror story after eavesdropping stranger's non-sense talk in the bus, do you? Well, he does. Is he just pure creepy or is he really a horror genius?In Nightmare Hour, reader will also find some illustrations that begin each of the story. I found some of them as cool and okay, but some of them are kind of disturbing. And honestly, my reason to postpone in reading this book for-what?-ten years? is because of this one particular illustration,But, you do get the different sensation in reading horror, right? Reading a book demands us to recreate the event in our head and mind, and at the same time, at least we feel involved with the story. So, imagine if you read horror, you must put yourself willingly to be frightened, because that’s what horror genre book is all about, to frighten the reader. Ugh, I’m so aware of this feeling because I haven’t read horror again since God-knows-when.One of the story that indeed made me shuddered is entitled Topeng Hitam (The Black Mask? I don’t know the exact title, but that’s that. I read the Indonesian translated version and clearly don’t bother to check the real title for the short story). It’s about a group of middle-age kids who like to play together in the basement of Kid A. One day, they find a black mask which is able to show you the unseen people if you wear the mask. The next day, the Kid A, who live in the house with the said basement, is face to face with a guy he doesn’t know but he'd seen him before... when he wore the black mask. And the story goes on and all the kids die. Typical horror. Almost all the main characters in Nightmare Hour’s short stories are end up in disaster. This book gives ten horrifying short stories that some of them succeed to discomfort me in the end. But, don’t take me as a standard in horror, really. My imagination is quite vivid when I read books, so I might be a little too carried away when reading this and spooked myself more than it probably should. But I did find some of the stories are just okay and not scary at all.However, I decided, I like this book. It’s a good thing that this book is formed as short story anthology, so the stories are rather brief and not scaring me too long. It’s still enjoyable for me.
This book is a collection of 10 stories by R.L. Stine, they are Halloween stories which were written to spook kids or just reading it for fun. The story that stood out to me was a story called I'm not Martin, the story takes place in a hospital when a young boy needs to have his tonsils removed. When he gets to his room there is another boy always screaming "I'm not Martin!" The nurses say that he is Martin and he is just scared for his surgery because he needed his leg removed. The day it was time for the surgery the real Martin took the clipboard from the end of his bed and switched it with his room mate when he was sleeping. The surgeons came to take him to the surgery room, but they got the wrong person so the boy screamed "I'm not Martin!" and they said " The nurses warned us you would say that." I can connect this book to another story/folktale. This is similar to The Boy who Cried Wolf, that is because the boy kept tricking the villagers into believing there was a wolf and when they came back it was just a trick, which is the same in this story when the real Martin keeps claiming I'm not Martin, but there is a twist in the endings. In The Boy who Cried Wolf, he was punished for lying to the villagers by getting eaten but in I'm not Martin an innocent person got hurt instead of the troublemaker. I give this book 3 stars because the stories in my opinion, were short and it always revolved around one major conflict in the story. But I liked how there were a variation of different stories.
What do You think about Nightmare Hour: Time For Terror (2000)?
I don't really think this book was that good. It was a pretty easy read, it wasn't boring just so damn predictable and incredibly cliche. I was going to use the fact that the book was written in the late 90's as an excuse to why this book was cliche, and as to why the characters dialogue was so flat boring and just things kids would not say. Then I remembered that Stephen king wrote Salem's Lot in the 70's and it still scared the hell out of me when I read it in like 2007 and it was a really good book even then. So that excuse went out the window. In other words the book was better than boring because it was relatively fast read and wasn't scary at all.
—Nicole
¿Quién no esperaba esto después de que me gustara tanto Socorro y fuera una niñita rara que miraba So Weird, Escalofríos y Le Temes a La Oscuridad en la tele? Como una ávida lectora de literatura fantástica, tengo un especial rincón en mi corazón para las historias de miedo. No soy extremadamente valiente ni nada, así que la pizca de terror que me dan y lo terriblemente curiosa que soy contribuyen a que no me pueda resistir cuando me ofrecen este tipo de historias.Recuerdo que encontré este libro en mis tradicionales visitas a la Feria Chilena del Libro cuando iba con mi familia al mall de Viña, no tardé mucho en quererlo con todas mis fuerzas. ¿Historias de miedo y RL Stine? I'm in. Convencí a mis papás para que me lo compraran y el resto es historia. Me lo acabé en un día o menos.Son cuentos, RL Stine cuenta cómo se le ocurrieron y, por si fuera poco, tienen ilustraciones al comienzo que te creepean bastante. Hay para todos los gustos, desde el terror psicológico hasta las típicas fuentes de pesadillas, y estoy segura que todos encontrarán uno de su agrado.¿Lo recomiendo? Sí, de todas maneras. Una muy buena adición para las historias de miedo.PD: Never forget No Soy Martín.
—Catie
Cuánto tiempo hacía que no leía nada de R. L. Stine, con lo que me gustaba su serie de "Pesadillas" a mis diecipocos...Con esta serie de diez relatos he vuelto a sentir aquello que sentí hace tiempo... y es que nunca sabías cómo podían terminar las historias de este autor. Te sorprendían sí o sí.Sí que es verdad que todas las narraciones tienen el mismo patrón (niñ@ que se encuentra con algo insólito en el lugar donde vive), pero me han enganchado sus historias como lo hicieron hace casi veinte años.
—Jesús Cardeña Morales
