A Shocker on Shock Street

A Shocker on Shock Street is the thirty-fifth book in the original Goosebumps book series. It was first published in 1995.

The cover shows one of the Giant Praying Mantises on Shock Street with its forearm on a stoplight and it's rear left foot on a car.

Plot
Erin Wright and her best friend, Marty, are big fans of a series of horror movies made under the Shock Street banner which had featured the monsters Ape Face, the Toadinator (a man who looks like a toad), and the Mad Mangler. Luckily for Erin, her father happens to be the designer of the new studio theme park for Shock Street! Erin's father has designed an intricate system of robotics for the new theme park attraction and he wants Erin and Marty to be the first children ever to tour the park.

Erin and Marty are dropped off at the theme park and are introduced to their tour guide Linda. She hands the children red toy guns and informs them that they are special monster-freezing guns. She then drops one of the guns and it fires off on her and she pretends to be frozen.

Erin and Marty are told that they will be the only ones on the tour, which is led through the entire park on a tracked tram. The tram first leads the children through a haunted house, which then turns into an indoor roller coaster. The trams are not fitted with safety belts and the two children almost fall out of the carts to their deaths.

After the children exit the haunted house, their tram is approached by various "stars" of the Shock Street movies including Ape-Face and Toadinator. The stars sign autographs for the children.

The tram enters "the Cave of the Living Creeps!" Upon entering the cave, large snake-sized white worms drop on the children, followed by a trip through a giant spider web filled with hundreds of crawling, real spiders. When the tram stalls in the middle of the cave, the two children get out and decide to walk to find an exit, only to find themselves surrounded by a half-dozen giant praying mantises. The praying mantises spit hot sticky tar at the children, until Erin has a brilliant idea: in order to stop the mantises, they need to step on them, like with real insects.

After kicking away the giant mantises, the children finally exit the cave. They find themselves on a two-scale representation of the Shock Street, which is a locale featured repeatedly in the series of films they enjoy. Marty decides to visit the graveyard, but he falls in an open grave. As Erin attempts to fish him out, hundreds of green hands thrust out of the ground in all directions. The hands pin Marty to the ground and Erin kicks away at them, with the two children both losing their shoes and socks in the process of freeing Marty. As they run to escape the cemetery, they decide that they need to find the main service road so they can find their way back to the main studio building. Erin spots an elevated stone wall to assist in being able to spot the road from a higher vantage point.

As the children hop barefoot towards the wall, they get trapped in quicksand. The two children sink down to their noses and death is certain until they are rescued by two werewolves, who pull them out of the mud.

The two werewolves are Wolf Boy and Wolf Girl, two more stars of the Shock Street series. The children try to reason with the stars of the attraction. But after the wolves try to eat the children, they realize that they are not actors or robots at all, but actual monsters. Erin and Marty make it to the top of the wall and the wolves try jumping up to snatch the children repeatedly. Erin finds one of the red toy guns they were given and aims it at the monsters; however it turns out to be useless junk. The two children fall backwards on the other side of the wall at the same convenient time that the werewolves make their way to the top of the wall. The two children spot their tram moving quickly in the distance and they try to run to catch it. As Erin and Marty are running towards the tram, the werewolves are in hot pursuit of the children. The two manage to jump into the last streetcar of the tram and they speed away past the werewolves in triumph.

But the tram is full of skeletons and is headed right towards a giant stone castle! The two children jump out just in time as the tram crashes through the stone wall.

The two children run around a little while, until they find themselves back on the street they call Shock. They curse themselves, because they got there too late. "Cut!" yells the director, who then walks over to the two children and tells them how successful filming has gone. Erin is confused and she wants to see her father. The director tells the children that all they have to do is run through "Shockro's House of Shocks" and take a left and they will find Erin's father. Erin knows from watching the movies that the entryway to Shockro's House of Shocks would normally cause anyone entering to be killed instantly by thousands of volts of powerful electricity. The director explains that the children have nothing to fear, because this is a movie set after all.

Marty runs towards the house with Erin right behind him. Erin looks behind her and sees that the director has a giant plug running through his back-- HE IS A ROBOT! She screams to stop Marty but she is too late. He enters the house and is hit with a powerful shock that drops him to the ground. Erin runs after him to save him. As she runs over to the body, she sees her father inside the building. But then she realizes it is not really her father at all. And that is when her speech slurs and grounds to a halt. Both the Marty and Erin robots have stopped working correctly. Erin's "father," the robotics expert, tells his co-workers that they just need some new chips and then the robotic children will be fine to finish testing out the theme park.

Media
A Shocker on Shock Street has been release on DVD over three times. The 2006 DVD release includes the episode, Click as a bonus.

Reprints
A Shocker on Shock Street was first reprinted in 2003, and was reprinted a second time as Classic Goosebumps book #23 in 2015, as a tie in to the Goosebumps film.

TV series
A Shocker on Shock Street was adapted into an episode of the Goosebumps TV series as the first episode of Season 3, and is simply titled Shocker on Shock Street, omitting the "A".

Film
A giant praying mantises appears in the Goosebumps film as an antagonist, and the original cover of the book is featured in the end credits animation.