Revenge of the Invisible Boy

Revenge of the Invisible Boy is the ninth book in the Goosebumps SlappyWorld book series. It was published in 2019.

The cover illustration depicts the invisible boy, Frankie Miller, at school. His handprint is on a locker, and a sad face has been spray-painted on the locker behind him.

Blurb
Magic Club is supposed to be fun for Frankie Miller and his friends. But that pest, Ari Goodwyn is always ruining everyone's tricks. After a really embarrassing fail, Frankie wants revenge. When the legendary magician, Mystical Marvin, comes to town to perform his daring stunts, Frankie sees an opportunity to get even with Ari. There's only one problem: everything goes wrong. Can Frankie and his friends make things right? Or will the opportunity disappear... forever?

Plot
Frankie Miller is in a magic club with his friends Melody Richmond and Eduardo Martinez, but they are also joined by Ari Goodwyn, who Frankie hates for being a total goof who always messes up his tricks. However, Ari's rec room is the only good place they can hold meetings, so they are forced to keep Ari in. One day, Frankie is performing a levitation trick in the school auditorium when Ari lets go of the cord lifting Frankie up on purpose, making him crash to the ground. Embarrassed, Frankie wishes there was a way to get back at Ari.

A few days later, a world famous magician named Mystical Marvin comes to Frankie's town and the magic club is able to score second row tickets to the show. Marvin pulls off tricks such as making himself breath underwater for a half hour on stage, that make people wonder how he's able to pull them off. Frankie is chosen as a volunteer for the show, and afterwards, he has Melody sneak backstage with him so they learn how Marvin does his tricks. They approach Marvin in his dressing room and ask him if he can teach them the vanishing trick. Because Frankie is a fellow magician, he agrees to tell them and he reveals it's not a trick, but something he can actually do with the help of a potion that he was taught how to make.

He is pulled away to take a phone call. Looking at the potion, Frankie gets the idea to take it so he can use it to finally get back at Ari, by making him disappear. He tells Melody and Eduardo about the plan and despite Eduardo's concerns about what the potion will do to Ari, they go through with it by slipping some into Ari's lemonade during the next meeting. However, Ari reveals that he overheard them discussing their plan and he switched their drinks at the last minute. Suddenly, Frankie turns invisible. At first he's shocked, but he realizes he can get back at Ari with invisible pranks.

But while Marvin said the potion wears off after ten minutes, Frankie is still invisible after that time goes by. Frankie decides to take this chance to go out and scare people. He goes to school where he starts messing with kids such as a bully named Richie. But after they have their fun, Frankie is still invisible and they start getting worried that the potion will never wear off. They decide they must go back to Mystical Marvin and ask him how to reverse the potion's effects. However, when they get there they discover that he is not there, and the janitor reveals that Marvin has vanished and no one has seen him since his last show.

Because Frankie doesn't want to break the news to his parents, he stays at Eduardo's house that night. After school the next day, they go to a local magic shop called Abacadabra N Stuff to see if the owner, Jerome, knows what they can do about the potion, only to discover that Jerome has turned it into a broth store. Frankie runs home in frustration, and is soon caught by his parents and explains to them what happened. Worried sick about their son, they take him to Uncle Siggy, who is a supposedly brilliant scientist despite being a bit eccentric. He does some tests and tries to create an acid that will make Frankie visible again, but it fails.

When Siggy leaves to re-mix the acid, Frankie slips away to go back to Mystical Marvin's, hoping at least some of his stuff would still be there and he would have something that can help. He discovers a bottle labeled "Appearing Formula" and drinks it, only to find out that he misread it, and it was only more of the disappearing potion. Frankie storms out and ends up in the park, where he bumps into an invisible man who reveals himself to be Marvin. He had drunk the potion for a trick but it hasn't worn off, and he has no idea how to fix this.

The next day at school, Frankie overhears his friends saying they plan to replace Frankie in the magic club, while keeping Ari despite him admitting that he ruins Frankie's tricks on purpose. Betrayed, Frankie puts some of the potion into their drinks during the next magic club meeting as revenge. But before they take their drinks, Ari's dog, Buster, senses that Frankie is there and starts licking him. This causes Frankie to become visible again, and he remembers that Marvin said the potion used animal slobber as an ingredient. They decide to celebrate with a drink, and Frankie has no time to warn his friends before they take their drinks and become invisible.

Concept artwork
Illustrated by Brandon Dorman.

Trivia

 * The title of this book is a reference to the ending of the Goosebumps film, where Brent Green types "The Invisible Boy's Revenge" on the typewriter. However, the book and film have no connection to one another, nor does the book have any connection to My Best Friend Is Invisible.
 * According to Brandon Dorman via his Instagram, he was assigned with creating a cover that shows an invisible boy in danger with a simple background in a school setting without any other kids present.
 * The title of this book originally featured an exclamation mark. This would be omitted in the final release.
 * The name of the school in the book is "Han Solo Middle School". This is a reference to the Star Wars character of the same name.
 * The book also references Spongebob Squarepants, Instagram, the New York Yankees, Wikipedia, YouTube, King Kong, McDonald's, The New York Mets, Frosted Flakes, The Invisible Man and Claude Rains.
 * Ari has a dog named Buster. There was a previously a dog with the same name in Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes.
 * Instead of a preview for the next book, Diary of a Dummy, the physical release of this book has the first two chapters of the fourth book in the SlappyWorld series, Please Do Not Feed the Weirdo.
 * Frankie's mom is mentioned by name in the book: Donna Miller.

Errors

 * While the cover depicts Frankie wearing clothes while invisible, in the book the potion makes his clothes vanish as well.
 * The original summary was a bit different from the final plot. In the initial summary, Frankie finds the recipe for the potion in an old book while in the book he gets the potion from a magician.