Piano Lessons Can Be Murder

 Piano Lessons Can Be Murder was the thirteenth book in the Goosebumps book series. It was preceded by Be Careful What You Wish For... and followed by The Werewolf of Fever Swamp.

Plot
Jerry and his parents have just moved into a new house. Jerry starts out the book by forming clumps of dust into mouse-shapes and then crying that there are mice in the new house, which scares his parents. While exploring the new house, Jerry finds an old piano in the attic. Later that night, Jerry hears piano music playing from the ceiling, but when he goes to investigate, there is no one playing. The next night, he hears the music again, goes to investigate, and discovers nothing. Eventually, Jerry sees a ghost of a woman playing the piano, which has been moved down into the family room. She looks up at him and then her face melts off, revealing a bare skull. He screams hysterically for his parents.

Picking up on Jerry's interest in the piano, Jerry's parents enroll him in private lessons taught by Dr. Shreek. Dr. Shreek is a friendly, Santa Claus-looking old man. Dr. Shreek dwells on Jerry’s hands, constantly telling him how wonderful they are. Eventually, Jerry gets invited to take private lessons at Dr. Shreek's private school at the edge of town. When Jerry tells Kim, the Asian girl whose locker is next to his, about his lessons, she freaks out and runs away. Jerry is dropped off at the large, scary looking music school for his lesson. He immediately goes inside and sees a monster in the hall, except, it is a robotic floor sweeper that looks like a monster. Dr. Shreek tells Jerry that the maintenance man, Mr. Toggle, is a wiz at robotics.

Dr. Shreek then leads Jerry down the long, winding corridors to the private rehearsal room. Jerry hears piano music coming from every room in the building. As he walks down the halls, he can see the instructors hunched over the pianos, guiding unseen students. After his lesson, Jerry gets lost in the building again and Mr. Toggle comes to his rescue and leads him back to the entrance. He also promises to show Jerry his "private workroom", the next time he visits.

Jerry returns home and continues to hear the ghost playing her music. Eventually, he goes down to confront her again, and she raises her arms and reveals bloody stumps where her hands used to be. Jerry screams so hard that he passes out and when he wakes up, his parents tell him they're taking him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist tells Jerry that he is imagining the ghost, but that he is not "crazy." Jerry is outside shoveling snow, when he runs into Kim again. He tries to tell her about the ghost he saw, but she also thinks he is crazy. He asks why she freaked out and she tells him that she heard a lot of spooky stories about the school and that's why she ran away, because she heard some stories. Jerry decides that he does not want to take lessons again.

But his parents tell him that since they've already paid for his last lesson, he can go in and tell Dr. Shreek in person that he is quitting. Jerry is dropped off at the school and wastes no time in telling Dr. Shreek that he is quitting his lessons. Dr. Shreek goes berserk and insists that he needs Jerry's hands, grabbing his wrists to force him to stay. Jerry escapes his grasp and scrambles through the school building until he reaches the auditorium, where there is a crushing cacophony of piano-playing. Jerry runs inside and sees row after row of black pianos, each with a head-nodding instructor, and each piano being played by human hands, but only human hands. Dr. Shreek dives through the air and tackles Jerry, grabbing onto his ankles.

Mr. Toggle bursts into the room and saves Jerry, by turning off Dr. Shreek with a remote. It turns out Dr. Shreek was a robot. Jerry asks Mr. Toggle to turn off the pianos and he does that as well. Jerry thanks him for saving his life. But as he turns to leave, Mr. Toggle stops him. Mr. Toggle is the one who needs Jerry's hands, he explains. Mr. Toggle is apparently a brilliant “robotician,” but he can't make human hands correctly. So he uses human specimens and using computer technology, makes the severed hands play beautiful music all the time.

Jerry tries to escape the auditorium, but he runs right into the ghost girl from his house. She screams at Jerry, telling him that she tried to warn him, to scare him away from taking lessons from the school. The ghost holds up her bloody stumps and then conjures up all of the ghostly spirits from the disembodied hands playing at the pianos in the auditorium. A swarm of ghosts attached to their human hands attack Mr. Toggle in front of Jerry, carrying the robotician off into the forest behind the school, never to be seen again...

Months later, Jerry decides to give up on the piano ambition and signs up for the baseball team, after going to a new school and making new friends. He is not only a good batter and runner, but also a good field man. He ends the story with him saying that his friends say he has "great hands".

Trivia

 * This is one of the few Goosebumps books to not have a surprise ending.
 * The tagline is a Play-on-words of the phrase "Play it again, Sam".

Television Adaptation
At the end, it is just Mr. Toggle's piano teacher instead of several ghosts. But instead of taking him away, she makes him play the piano. Dr. Shreek says, "That's what you get for scaring the boy!" Mr. Toggle repentantly asks, "How much longer?!" and Dr. Shreek replies, "Till eternity... you laaazy boy!"

Television Episode Trivia

 * Aron Tager, who played the hand-obsessed Dr. Shreek, was noted for his recurring role as the mad scientist Dr. Vink in Are You Afraid of the Dark? On the first occasion in The Tale of the Phantom Cab, he had a severed, jarred hand on display as the first glimpse of his character's nature.
 * This is the second of three television episodes on the DVD, The Blob That Ate Everyone.
 * The background music and the music that the ghostly woman, Jerry and the disembodied hands play throughout the episode is none other than Ludwig Van Beethoven's classic, Moonlight Sonata.
 * Ben Cook (Jerry Hawkins) would go on to play Josh Benson in Welcome to Dead House, and Marty in A Shocker on Shock Street.
 * This was the first episode directed by William Fruet, who would direct many episodes throughout all four seasons of the series.