Tick Tock, You're Dead! is the second book in the Give Yourself Goosebumps gamebook series. It was published in 1995.
The cover illustration consists of a mean looking face in a clock and a child hanging off one of the clock hands.
Blurb[]
GET TRAPPED...IN TIME!
B-O-R-I-N-G. That's how you'd describe your family vacation in New York City. Instead of visiting all the cool spots, like Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty, your parents drag you to a bunch of stupid museums.
Then, at the Museum of Natural History, something really strange happens. You accidentally get involved in a strange experiment that sends you traveling through time!
Will you duel with knights at a medieval castle? Come face-to-face with man-eating dinosaurs? Or take a ride through outer space? The choice is yours in this scary GOOSEBUMPS adventure that's packed with over 20 super spooky endings!
Plot[]
You are vacationing in New York City with your parents and your brother, Denny. You could care less about visiting the Museum of Natural History especially with your little brat of a red head younger brother running around and wreaking havoc! When Denny runs into a private workshop department, the scientist there tells you that he has invented a time machine and tells you that you can be the first person ever to travel through time! However, Denny runs inside, and gets lost in an unknown time period. You can go to prehistoric times, where vicious dinosaurs roamed, or the medieval times, battling wizards, dragons, and knights, or the future, where evil robots control humans. One thing is for sure, you will have to find Denny in two hours, or he will cease to exist!
Story A (Page 44)[]
You look for Denny in the past and have to survive prehistoric or medieval environments. There is only one way to get a good ending to this storyline, and it is also possible to either move from the medieval period to the prehistoric period or move to Story B by taking the prehistoric storyline.
Story B (Page 16)[]
You look for Denny in the future, ending up in a distant world where humans are ruled over by evil robots that you need to escape in order to survive. You can either face the robots in the school where they “frammilize” (put in a metal box and disintegrate into green light) students when they get impossibly hard questions wrong, or you can go back a little bit in time and join a rebellion and stop robots from taking over the world. Either way, you will then travel to the space age, where you must find Denny on a space station as his time is almost up.
Side Story C (Page 54)[]
From story B, you travel only one day into the future and learn that tomorrow, your whole family will be killed by an out-of-control truck with a broken accelerator. You now have to alter time to prevent this from happening.
List of endings[]
There are twenty-three bad endings, one ambiguous ending, and three good endings.
Bad endings[]
| Ending | Paths |
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In a rush to return to the present, you grab both the present and future Dennys - but this causes you to return to the present with both Dennys - meaning you’ll have to deal with two of him for the rest of your life. |
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You’re about to get hit by the runaway truck after you and your future self are fighting Denny. |
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You’re forced to leave Denny behind after causing a wretched fish smell because once you hit the brakes on the truck to save your family, a major pileup occurs, causing the fish stored inside the truck to fall out because the back doors were smashed by a taxi. |
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You steer a truck away from hitting your family, but you drove straight into a brick wall and die from the crash because there wasn’t enough time to hit the brakes… let’s just say you were a big hit on Broadway. |
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When you refuse to join the rebels, they decide to use you as bait to lure the robots. You try to plea for your life, but it turns out that one thing the robots have taught the rebels is to have no compassion. |
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After disguising yourself as a repairman, you tell the robot in the power building that you’re there to fix the romiframption. (central processor of a power plant) The robot falls for your alibi, tells you that you’re the first entity (robot or human) to diagnose the problem, and you’re forced to teach a class full of robots at a college because the robots think you’re super intelligent. |
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You’re tasked with blowing up the core in the power building that powers all the robots, and the bomb you’re given only works if it’s 3 feet within the core. Not wanting to risk wasting the bomb, you enter the power room to get it as close to the core as possible, but a robot locks you in the room, and you’re stuck with the bomb and it goes off. |
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You decide to avoid the robot guards at the entrance of the power building by entering an airless air duct, but you die from asphyxiation as you’re too big to crawl through and the robots trap you in. |
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After answering a question about quallicorks and adjubibbles wrong, it's implied that you were "frammilized" (put in a metal box and get disintegrated into green light). The book even mocks your death by saying that the only answer to your question is “TIME’S UP”. |
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The chronometer disintegrates, when the robot teacher is asking you how many electrons are found in a pound of taffy. You're now going to be frammilized as you do not know the answer. |
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You're searching for Denny inside a space station and get caught by robots and humans. You try to lie on why you're there, but they ask you a question that you answer incorrectly, which confirms to them that you're lying; they throw you out of the airlock and you explode. |
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Spend the rest of your life watching a video clip of George Washington crossing the Delaware River on a space station after trying to ask a robot guard for help. |
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A huge flower plant wraps a vine around you. You can't make any noise, and Denny can't see you because to him you look like part of the plant. |
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After failing to answer correctly a question from A Night in Terror Tower at a school, you are then frammilized. |
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You choose the zoo instead of school as a punishment from the robot judge during your trial. You are then placed in the 'Couch Potato' exhibit of a robot zoo. |
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You watch an egg hatch, hoping to be the first human to see a live baby dinosaur being born, but a prehistoric chicken emerges from the egg. The story ends here because Denny has taken the Chronometer and run off. |
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You and Denny get stuck and sink in quicksand after a dinosaur’s roar knocks you two in. It's implied that you two die. |
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The knight throws you into a crocodile-infested moat after failing to beat him in a duel in order to gain access to the castle. |
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After failing to beat the knighting test set up by the keeper of the dragon, you’re stuck taunting a dragon forever so he won't eat you. |
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About to be eaten by a giant lizard named Wizard, who is implied to have eaten Denny. |
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After answering a Goosebumps question wrong, you get stuck in the Corridors of Time with Denny, who is now an old man. |
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Stuck in a giant spider web with a giant spider gazing at you. |
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Return to the present, but leave behind Denny as a prince in the medieval times. This is presented as a bad ending because you failed to retrieve Denny, and your parents will be very angry and presumably ground you (However, by this stage, the reader may be glad to be rid of him). |
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You jump into a moat to avoid a knight, but there are crocodiles in the moat. It's implied that you were eaten by one of the crocodiles. |
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Ambiguous endings[]
| Ending | Paths |
|---|---|
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You and Denny escape from a robot in a space station and travel back to the present. As soon as you get back, Denny begins complaining. You question whether or not rescuing him was worth the trouble. |
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Good endings[]
| Ending | Paths |
|---|---|
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You and Denny save your family from being hit by a truck and you trick Denny into coming back to the present with you. |
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You save your family from being hit by a truck and save 2,000 mice. If you want to get this ending, you cannot wear green. |
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You and Denny get transported to a strange land, where the inhabitants make you their king. You get revenge on Denny, by making him your slave. |
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Page map (missing)[]
Goosebumps Trivia Questions[]
- What were the three objects used by the ancient British wizard Morgred to travel in time?
- A pin, pipe, and a potato
- Magic stones
- How do you travel in time using the Cuckoo Clock of Doom?
- Pull the bird out three times
- Twist the bird’s head
International releases[]
| Gallery | |
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 Spanish (¡Tic, Tac, Muere! - Tick, Tock, Die!)  Portuguese (Viagem no Tempo - Time Travel)  Norwegian (Tikk-Takk, Du Er Død! - Tick Tock, You Are Dead!)  Finnish (Armoton Aikamatka - Ruthless Time Travel)  Turkish (Tik! Tak! Sen Öldün! - Tick! Tock! You Are Dead!)  Canadian (Tic Toc, Bienvenue en Enfer - Tick Tock, Welcome to Hell)  Hebrew (!תיק תק... אתה מת - Tick Tock... You're Dead!)  Persian (تیک تاک، شما مردهاید! - Tick-tock, You're Dead!)  Chinese (生死一瞬间 - A Moment of Life and Death) | |
Artwork[]
Trivia[]
- Since it was first published in 1995, this book mentions the original World Trade Center, which was destroyed during the September 11 attacks in 2001. All mentions of the original World Trade Center were altered in the digital rerelease of the book.
- The World Trade Center was mentioned on the first page of the book, but the digital release mentions the Empire State Building instead.
- The original World Trade Center is referenced again on page sixteen, but the digital rerelease chooses to reference One World Trade Center instead.
- The ebook changes "twentieth century" to "twenty first century".
- This book contains trivia questions about A Night in Terror Tower and The Cuckoo Clock of Doom, with both questions involving time travel.
- It is possible for the reader to go through every storyline of Story A and Story B in this order by time period: Medieval, Prehistoric, Future, Human/Robot War, Space Age. It is the second longest route possible in any Give Yourself Goosebumps Book at 61 different pages.
- If the reader's main choice is to search for Denny in the past, only one choice leads to a good ending, but only on dates that are even like October 26. The reader can only reach a good ending on an odd date by choosing to go to the future. One of the bad endings achieved by going to the past advises the reader to try searching in the future next time.
- The title of this book may be a reference to a tagline for the 1986 horror movie House: "Ding Dong, You're Dead".
- The narration text in one of the endings says that the inhabitants crown the reader their king, but the characters themselves do not explicitly call the reader by that term; this can be interpreted as either assuming the reader is male or as assuming the reader is female but open to ruling under a masculine title. The book otherwise keeps the reader's gender ambiguous, supporting the latter idea.
- According to Mark Nagata, he isn't overly fond of this cover as he felt it didn't capture the Goosebumps style. [1]