Mostly Ghostly 08 – Don’t Close Your Eyes!

R. L. Stine's Don't Close Your Eyes is the eighth Mostly Ghostly story, a spooky comedy for 9 year olds about a boy who absolutely must not fall asleep.

What happens

Max Doyle is a sixth grader with a problem nobody else can see. Two ghosts live in his house. Nicky and Tara used to live there, they don't know how they became ghosts, and Max is the only person who can see or hear them.

This time the trouble starts with a book. Tara is reading an old volume about evil spirits, hunting for a way to come back to life. It crashes to the floor and the words start sliding across the pages into a puddle of ink.

The puddle rises up in the shape of a man. Then it sinks right into Max.

It's Inkweed, and he makes Max type out a promise. The moment Max falls asleep, Inkweed will escape and put all three of them to sleep forever.

So Max has to stay awake. For hours, then for days. The book opens with him two whole days without sleep, doing maths homework for his crush Traci and scribbling all over the kitchen table instead of the paper.

It's scary and silly in equal measure. Black ink comes spraying out of Max at the breakfast table, all over his family. Tara wakes him up by bashing him on the head with a book. And Max's excuses get more and more ridiculous (he tells a librarian the book that hit him was about lumberjacks. Timberrr!).

There are some genuinely creepy moments too. Inkweed takes over Max's body when he's angry, and he watches himself do things he'd never do. For a reader who likes a proper shiver with their jokes, that's the good stuff.

One thing to flag. Home isn't always kind to Max. His big brother Colin punches him in the stomach and calls him Fat Face, and his dad mostly laughs along. It's played for laughs, but a child who has a hard time with an older sibling might notice it.

What to read next

It helps to know the ghosts already, as this is well into the series. If this is your reader's first Mostly Ghostly, go back to Who Let the Ghosts Out, which begins on a cold night when Nicky and Tara are walking home and nothing seems to work properly.