Courtney King is a character in the fifteenth Goosebumps book, You Can't Scare Me!, and its television adaptation.
History[]
You Can't Scare Me![]
Eddie and his friends can't stand Courtney. She's a showoff. Nothing seems to scare her, and her constant acts of bravery leave the group the laughingstock of their school. After a class field trip, Eddie decides it's time to scare Courtney for real. He puts a rubber snake in her lunch — and even tries dropping a tarantula on her head. But their plans to scare her keep going awry, because she is completely unafraid every time.
After numerous attempts, Eddie and his friends decide that frightening Courtney might be impossible. However, he then changes his mind when he gets a bright idea one morning during school. Courtney reveals that she believes in monsters — especially the Mud Monsters of Muddy Creek, said to rise once a year when the moon is full. Eddie recruits his brother Kevin to dress up as one of the monsters in hopes it will finally scare Courtney. The group successfully lure Courtney and her friend Denise into Muddy Creek, but things don't go as planned.
The real Mud Monsters emerge from the creek, and finally, Courtney screams. However, Eddie is too afraid himself to celebrate the victory. Weeks later, he is still tense and paranoid over the events at Muddy Creek, as is everyone else, except Courtney. She's begun bragging that she was right about monsters all along. Eddie wants to scare her again — but he's too afraid to try now.
Goosebumps HorrorTown[]
She started investigating mysterious happenings such as some torn up animals and started thinking that there was some sort of monster on the loose. She discovered it was the work of Will Blake, who revealed himself to be a werewolf, but otherwise not that bad, only going after small animals. He also started hitting on her and she seems to return the feelings.
Later, a bully named Marty started getting sick of how brave she is and teamed with Dustin to try to scare her. Their first few attempts failed, but they discovered she had an encounter with the Mud Monsters as a child and has been scared of them ever since. They also saw that Courtney had struck up a friendship with a girl named Lucy Del Rio, who had started a mystery solving club. They took advantage of this by telling Courtney that Lucy was being held captive by Mud Monsters, so that when she tried to save her, they would pretend to be Mud Monsters and finally scare her.
She took on her fear to save her new friend, and they all ended up face to face with the real Mud Monsters. They were all scared off, and Lucy scolded Marty and Dustin for attempting to pull such a mean joke on Courtney. After all this, Marty became too scared to try to scare Courtney again.
General information[]
Personality[]
Courtney is extremely brave. Things that would scare most people don't seem to affect her. She holds a tarantula and even bees in her hand without flinching. She rescues Eddie from a green snake, which she tells him is completely harmless. Her attitude has made Eddie and his friends dislike her greatly, as they see her as nothing but a showoff. They try their best to scare her, but nothing seems to work, and they only end up embarrassed.
Courtney is shown to be kind and helpful to some people, but she does have her moments of teasing and mocking others. She firmly believes in monsters, and when she encounters them for real, she brags about how she was right about their existence all along.
In Goosebumps HorrorTown, she is portrayed as being stoic but is otherwise a good person.
Physical appearance[]
Courtney is described as having blonde hair and blue eyes. In Horrortown, she's shown to wear a long sleeve blue coat with a black dress and high heeled boots. She also wears grey gloves on her hands.
Gallery[]
Reginal Depictions[]
TV[]
Trivia[]
- Courtney is never given a surname in the book, but is given one in the television adaptation.
- The way in which Courtney bores the Mud Monsters to death in the television episode is reminiscent of a piece of Greek mythology in which Hermes uses long and uninteresting stories to bore the giant Argus Panoptes into sleeping; Hermes then casts a spell that makes Argus's sleep eternal.
- Charlotte Sullivan also appeared in an episode of the first series revival of Are You Afraid of the Dark? She portrayed the character: Diana in "The Tale of the Hunted".