Goosebumps 6 – Let’s Get Invisible!

R. L. Stine's Let's Get Invisible is a Goosebumps story for 8 year olds about a boy who finds an old mirror that can make him vanish.

What happens

Max turns twelve on a rainy Saturday. The party's stuck indoors. Then his dog Whitey (who is completely black, obviously) starts scratching at a door in the attic that nobody knew was there.

Behind it is a tiny room with nothing in it but a tall mirror and an odd lamp on top. Max pulls the chain to switch the light on. His friends start shrieking. They can't see him!

Max tells the story himself and he's very funny company. He spends ages on his hair because it hides his big ears. His ten-year-old brother Lefty throws a softball round the house and falls over about a hundred times a day.

Being invisible is brilliant at first. Max and Lefty creep up to the attic at night to try it together. Then Max shows off to his best friend Zack, who usually knows everything first. Imagine being able to float a cardboard box around in front of your mate!

But each time, coming back takes a little longer. Max starts to feel dizzy and floaty, as though the mirror is pulling at him. That's where the story gets its shivers.

A lot of the scares are brothers winding each other up. Lefty leaps out of a cupboard on the dark landing. He hides behind a box and lets Max and Zack think he's vanished too. So you're never quite sure what's real.

There's nothing gory here. The fear is a quieter one. What if you went invisible and couldn't come back? A worrier might want to talk that one through.

If your reader has ever wished they could disappear for an afternoon, they'll love this. It's light on monsters and big on the what-ifs.

What to read next

For another family where something found by chance turns out to be trouble, try Night of the Living Dummy. Twin sisters Kris and Lindy compete over everything, and that only gets worse when Lindy pulls a ventriloquist's dummy out of a skip.