Book Review : The Nightmare Room - Dear Diary, I'm Dead : when you take advantage of the future's globe given to you, don't expect for no payment

I haven't read the nightmare room series, but I could say one thing is that this is similar to Goosebumps, friendly for children but to terrify them at the same time. This is a perfect book to give to your naughty children too, I would do it if I'm a parent already, especially from this plot, it gives so much lesson from bits of comedy and frightening threats from just a single black book

Title : The Nightmare Room : Dear Diary, I'm Dead

Author : R.L Stine

Year : 2000

Collation : 164 pages

I wanted to compare this book with others from the same Nightmare Room series but this is the first book I've read and I have to review this as fast as possible or I'd forget about it. From the way I see it, and why I could say it's similar to Goosebumps is because of the language, how the character speaks, mostly first point of view and childish, it's like R.L Stine manage to act as a child while writing this down, it sounds so convincing that a child is writing this with their jokes, their slangs (I do not understand some of it), and their way of viewing life, I could say this of course I remember what it felt like as a child, but I guess that's the reason why R.L Stine had done a great work in writing down children's horror books. 

I started to read this because of the synopsis, but I'll reveal it later, but mostly because from the digital library, this book provided a 14-days loan so I thought I would have some time to read later, but instead, I read the whole thing in just few hours, probably because I've got nothing else to do. 

Alex Smith discovers a diary in his room that predicts the future, including his death.

 

Okay that's a really short synopsis and I got it from wikipedia's book list of The Nightmare Room series, I was just too lazy to copy the whole thing from the back of the book. But you understand what it's saying, it's a simple story, and I bet with a bit of twist, or so I thought.

What I think makes this book is different from the others that I put on my want-to-read list is, the simplicity of the whole story, as you can see it's just a diary and I'm getting the death note vibe though it's totally a different thing. At first, it's just filled with a bad habit of a young kid named Alex who loves to bet until he broke, his parents acknowledge this but he just can't stop it but I'm going to tell the detailed summary later, now back to Alex, lots of kid are the same like Alex, just different kind of habit but still the same negativity, and I think after I read the whole thing, this is the perfect book to give to your children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, friends' children, you mention it, all of them! it's terrifying and I hate the ending. 

Just like what the synopsis said, Alex is a boy who loves to bet his money on everything, even during his normal conversation with his parents he would slip "I bet" into any of his upcoming joke, he has a competitor named Tessa, they literally compete everyday and he always loses, okay I'll just get to the point. His mother brought him a desk and inside the drawer, he found a black book where he started to write his diary in it (at first it's for his task to get more credit from his teacher, also to compete with Tessa) but then the diary would write on its own paper using Alex's writing style, an exact style. He panicked of course but whatever the tomorrow entry says, it predicts the future, he managed to take advantage of it by avoiding some bad experience in it, or using the information about game winning (which teams wins or loses) for a money bet, but things started to get worse when the diary predicts an accident like when he was about to get hit by a car, he couldn't avoid it at all, or him purposely jumping from roof and many other bad things that could hurt him or other people, and the bad news is when he tried to avoid his act that the diary had predicted, he loses control of himself and the diary just controls his whole body to follow the whole prediction exactly the same way, until his own death, struck by a lightning. That's not even the worse part, or should I say the terrifying part? to me it's a nightmare, he wakes up after his death and returns to the same memory before he recognize the diary, his mother comes up to him and gave him a new desk, he opened up the drawer and found the diary, it's just starting  all over again! this is like one of those stories if people's souls are getting stuck into a certain place, they just repeat their activities until their death, repeat again and again, that's a hell. 

After I had finished reading it, I thought there might be a rule for the diary after all, it predicts the future and sometimes you shouldn't change your future even if you know about it, the time has been written already, it's like you're going to the past and trying to change everything but instead it's going to be a disaster because the changes you did in the past, are not supposed to happen in the future, well, maybe it's just my belief from other movies saying that you can't just mess up the timeline, unless you're in Back to The Future world. I know it sounded so bad, but Alex's first predictions were harmless, maybe if he just pretended that he didn't read that, things could go normal and he won't be doing any illogical stuff that were predicted to happen right after he corrupted his own knowledge of his future, he takes advantage of it for the sole of seeing others' suffering, to feel as a winner, a very selfish purpose and there he got what he maybe deserved, that's why I put up the title of this book review like that, I'm sure when he really did want to take advantage of the book, there might be a payment, through those illogical stuff he did or even his soul, but I guess this is more like a karma theory involving the devil or the curse of the book.

It's a great book, overall it's totally great for children, just like what I said in the beginning that I would suggest kids reading this especially if they just misbehaved, also this book is funny, I'm a grown ass woman who's usually can't laugh that easy from kids' jokes but not gonna lie, this book made me laugh, it's like R.L Stine wants to make us reader feel entertained and happy first then he just shutted it down by the ending of this book, crazy. Also, everytime Alex tries to open the next page of the future diary to see what's the prediction for tomorrow, I can feel what he feels, I feel a bit tense and just keep scrolling to see what's going to happen next, until he finally sees that the next page is just "DEAD", I never actually thought that he's going to die, and worse, to actually repeat the whole process all over again from the beginning. Then I remember, this is similar to Goosebumps' Welcome To Dead House or Say Cheese And Die, where both of those books end up with tormenting their characters knowing that they're dead already. Twisted and horrible ending, it gives a terrifying realization that we would never know what happens afterlife. 

I found that the weakness is just one, I can't bare with its ending, it's even more terrifying than the fear street series, however don't expect this story is gling to be creepy with ghost or something, this is more like an entity playing God on its victim and just casually tormenting it, children, to make it worse. 

Despite I've been seeing it as a great story, good delivarance of language, understandable, funny, and tense, I wouldn't call it as one of my favorite books, or favorite type of story, possibly because of my personal taste, as I'm getting older I just keep wanting more sinister stories like the fear street, but I admit sometimes when things get too dark in my head, I'd love to read some from Goosebumps and The Nightmare Room since they have more comedic feel. 

The perfect audience for this book is obviously children, whether they misbehaved or not, but it also applies to grown ups and I bet (ironically saying this) they would get this eerie feeling by the end of the book, who the hell wanted to be tormented like that?. Good Day!