After his father’s beat-up car is wrecked and needs to be replaced, the family buys a luxury sports sedan from a mysterious local who sells the car at a shockingly low price. Mitchell’s excitement over the new car soon turns to dread as he discovers that the vehicle has a mind of its own—an evil mind. Unfortunately, his parents won’t believe him, so it’s up to him to uncover the dangerous secret behind this haunted car.t’s unsurprising that Stine wanted to include a “haunted car” story in the Goosebumps library, considering how classic that set-up has become: the machine you’re supposedly controlling coming alive and going on a rampage. This is a tricky topic to cover for a Goosebumps book, though, considering the target audience and main characters are below the legal driving age, and thus are limited in their grasp of such horror.

Still, Stine dives into the subject with enthusiasm and a passion for detail, teaching kids automotive jargon from the first page, using words like fender, chassis, and fiberglass. The first sentences even mention a ’57 Chevy Impala and a ’92 Firebird V8. The text does a commendable job of introducing terminology to young readers.

Stine’s short chapters and fast-paced writing makes The Haunted Car a quick read with swift pacing that still spends multiple chapters building the family relationships. Unfortunately, once the car actually starts attacking, its menace and exploitation is limited. Scenes consist of recurring scenarios where the doors lock, the air conditioning runs cold, and sometimes the car drives around. It seems like the author felt limited in possibilities for scares if the car wasn’t going to actually kill anyone or cause physical harm—which is good, since this is a book for children. Still, there are many ways you could make a car scary without blood or gore, like having the seat belt try to choke or the seats crush. There are ways to show the car’s menace other than the cringe-inducing method of the car’s voice blatantly stating, “I’m so evil.”

The scenes in between vehicle attacks consist of the cliched dynamic where the child tries to convince the parents of something they refuse to believe. Additionally, the ending was surprisingly abrupt conside