The Creepy Creations of Professor Shock was the fourteenth book in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series. It was preceded Scream of the Evil Genie and followed by Please Don't Feed the Vampire!
The cover illustration consisted of an evil looking upper body of a robot strapped to a wall, with robot parts and machinery around it. The robot's left hand is not connected to it and is laying on a table. The bottom half of the robot is also not connected to the robot, but it is not visible in the picture. The robot was already up and running, and was reaching out with its fist. The tagline was, "He's into heavy metal... really heavy metal."
While the cover illustration depicts an evil robot, this is not a central element in the story. The title is similar to the title of another book in the series, The Deadly Experiments of Dr. Eeek.
There are 21 endings: 18 bad endings and 3 good ones.
Plot
You and your best friends, Jason and Stacey (who are twin siblings), take a job cleaning the garage of an inventor. You and your friends are told to avoid a particular door in the garage but you enter it anyway. Once inside, the three of you find a robot and a pinball machine, with a choice to press the button for either one.
Story A
You switch on the robot, which comes to life and destroys the room. A box gets smashed and you think it looks like something important, so you pocket the remains hoping to fix them before Professor Shock notices. At this point, Professor Shock comes in and deactivates the robot. He is so angry that you run away from the house. Back at home, you reassemble the box, which turns out to be a remote control. You discover that it controls all the machines in the world. This storyline then follows you getting caught up in a war between machines and humanity.
Story B
You switch on the pinball machine. Nothing happens at first; but then you hear Professor Shock coming, and you hide behind the pinball machine, along with Stacey and Jason. At this point, you all get sucked into a large mirror that was stored behind the machine. You then end up in a strange world where everything works backwards; and have to find a way to escape.
Bad Endings
- You, Jason and Stacey get off the elevator into a funhouse-type place, with a giant Professor Shock looking down at you through the glass ceiling. It turns out that somehow, you have shrunk and ended up in his pinball machine. Professor Shock plays with the pinball machine, trying to hit you. He cheats and tilts the machine, and you're apparently killed by the ball.
- You apologize to Professor Shock for switching on the robot, and offer to make amends for the damage you've caused. It turns out that he likes to watch many televisions at the same time, and the box the robot broke was the remote control for all the sets. Since you broke his remote, he forces you to change the channels and settings for all the different sets manually. You are apparently stuck doing this forever.
- By pressing the Fast Forward button, you fast forward through all the phases of Professor Shock's plan, completing it. Everyone, including you and the Professor, has become a machine.
- You and the twins try to escape in the bumper cars, but Stacey's car hits into yours, and the remote control gets crushed. You are now trapped in the bumper cars; without the remote, you can't switch them off, and they are going so fast that you'll be killed if you try to jump out.
- You try to escape the mall by smashing a window, but the noise attracts Professor Shock's robot. It informs you that machines have taken over the world, and you are all now slaves.
- You, Stacey, and Jason are being chased by a bull in the mirror world, so you decide to split up and run. But the bull splits up into three, and it's implied that the three of you are killed.
- You plan to cross the lake to the palace but are warned of sharks. You don't believe this, since you know that sharks don't live in lakes. But when you reach the water, you're attacked and eaten by flying sharks (everything in this world is backwards, meaning sharks live in the sky.)
- Stepping through a funhouse mirror causes your body to become twisted and warped like your reflection. You realize the same has happened to Stacey and Jason. At this point, it turns out you're on stage as contestants in a "beauty contest." The judge declares you the winner, then the lights come on in the auditorium, and you see that the people in the audience are funhouse freaks too.
- You're trying to find a red dot on one of the mirrors in the hall, indicating that it's the exit. But someone has cleaned all the mirrors and removed the dot; now, you have no way to escape.
- You didn't get advice from Professor Shock, so you become a stone carving in the Queen's chamber after touching one.
- You lie to the Queen about why you came to her palace. But her mirror told her all about you, so she knows you're lying. She refuses to turn Stacey and Jason back to normal. You're forced to tell her she's beautiful (which the mirror can't do, since it only speaks the truth), apparently forever, or she will turn you to stone too.
- After you pocket the twins, who have been turned into carvings, you try to run but the Queen catches you. She is so angry at you breaking your word to her that she imprisons you in a hall of mirrors. You know that one of the mirrors is a revolving door leading out of the hall; but you can't work out which one, so you're trapped.
- You wait around for your reflection to come back, then a crazed monstrosity appears in the glass. You think it's just an illusion, but it reaches out its hand and crushes you in its grip.
- You're caught in a cycle of chasing your own reflection in and out of the mirror; for some reason, the reflection is scared of you and trying to run away.
- In the mirror world, you encounter a mirror and think it might be able to take you back to your own world. You smash the mirror in the hope of crossing through; but the glass shards rearrange themselves around you and the twins. Your reflections trade places with you, trapping you inside the mirror.
- The man with the deep voice turns out to be Agent Jones, who works for the government. Professor Shock designs weapons for them, including the remote control, which Agent Jones was sent to recover from you because it is so dangerous. When you tell him you have pressed the red button, he announces it's too late: you activated the weapon, and something too horrible to describe is going to happen any second now.
- Your bicycle takes you into a junkyard and dumps you in a pile of people. You're told this is because humans are considered useless garbage in the machine world.
- A laser beam comes out of the remote control and hits your Walkman. The music grows deafeningly loud and, somehow, you can't remove your headphones or turn the sound off. In desperation, you smash the remote control. This stops the music - but then a spark from the broken remote lands on the Walkman, which causes it to grow and grow, trapping you inside your room.
Good Endings
- Stacey and Jason reveal that they and Uncle Jack are cyborgs, and that they used you to nab the remote from Professor Shock. As a reward for helping the cyborgs take over earth, they offer to make "you" a cyborg, as well. It's implied that you actually become one.
- The remote becomes useless and Red can't use it, so the cyborg invasion is stopped. You and your friends cheer, thinking you've saved the day; but Professor Shock tells you the remote's batteries just ran out. He says it's a good thing he didn't use stronger ones.
- You escape the mirror world and end up back at Professor Shock's house. He's so impressed that you escaped, he wants to take your pictures with a special camera he's invented, to see if you can escape from the photographic negative. You refuse, and push Jason and Stacey out of there. Stacey wants to come back, as she thinks it would be fun to explore another world, but you flatly refuse.
Trivia
- Some prints of the book incorrectly claim that Secret Agent Grandma is the next book, when it's really Please Don't Feed the Vampire!
- The Mirror world that the reader enters in this book contains plot elements similar to those in Lewis Carroll's book, Through the Looking Glass.
- Professor Shock makes an appearance in the 2015 Goosebumps movie alongside other Goosebumps villains and monsters.
- At the beginning of the book, Professor Shock initially thinks you were sent by Acme Cleanup.
- One choice in the book depends on the number of letters in your first name. If you have the "wrong" number of letters, you'll hit a bad ending; so the reader is forced to cheat in order to complete the storyline.
- Storyline A has several variables depending on the choices you make: what the red button is for, whether Professor Shock is good or bad, and the identity of the person with the deep voice.