Welcome to Dead House by R. L. Stine is the first installment of the Goosebumps series. This series of over 60 books follows preteen protagonists through comical or frightening adventures involving the supernatural and the occult. Goosebumps is the second best-selling book series in the world, having sold over 400 million copies worldwide and topped several bestseller lists, including The New York Times. Welcome to Dead House was later republished as the 13th installment in the Classic Goosebumps series, and the book was directly adapted into two episodes for the Canadian Goosebumps television series produced by Scholastic and Fox Kids in the 1990s. Stine is a prolific American author of children’s horror novels, including the Goosebumps, Fear Street, and Mostly Ghostly series, among others. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Ohio State University, where he was the editor of The Sundial, the school’s literary humor magazine, for three years.

This guide refers to the 1992 first Scholastic edition.

Plot Summary

Welcome to Dead House follows siblings Amanda and Josh Benson through their first few weeks in their new home in the town of Dark Falls. After an obscure uncle of their father’s leaves the family a free house in his will, the Bensons hurry to claim the inheritance. While Amanda and Josh’s parents remain optimistic, the children are less enthused once they see how old and creepy their new house is. In addition, Amanda keeps seeing figures that suddenly disappear, and something about the town’s cemetery sets the family’s normally mild-mannered dog on edge. This leaves the kids wondering if there’s more to Dark Falls than meets the eye. When their parents continuously dismiss their concerns as overactive imaginations and stress, Amanda and Josh resolve to make the best of their new home.

On their first night in Dark Falls, Amanda and Josh have restless nights, each plagued by nightmares. The next day, they venture into town, where they meet a group of kids who seem nefarious one moment and nice the next. Despite this, Amanda and Josh do their best to make friends with the other kids, even though the siblings never truly feel like they belong.

After playing with the kids one day, Amanda and Josh discover that their dog got off his leash. Hours later, they can’t find the animal, and they return home, despondent. Their parents attend a neighborhood party that night, and Josh realizes that the dog likely went back to the cemetery to investigate. He and Amanda go to the cemetery, where they run into a boy from town and find their dog, who doesn’t seem to recognize them. As the kids chase the dog through the stones, they realize that the grave markers are for the people in the town and that they all died years ago.

The boy reveals that he has been tasked with watching the kids so that they don’t learn the town’s secret and try to escape. After an industrial accident in the town’s factory, a strange gas killed everyone, turning them into the living dead. Every year, Dark Falls invites a new family so that they can be sacrificed and fed upon to feed the town, and the town is kept as dark as possible because light destroys the townspeople. The boy tries to kill Amanda so that she can’t share the secret, but Josh saves her by shining his flashlight on the boy and making him disintegrate.

The party was an excuse to capture Amanda and Josh’s parents. As the sun rises, the kids find their parents tied up in an amphitheater deep within the cemetery. The living dead surround them, kept safe from the light by an enormous tree. The tree’s roots are coming up from the ground, and Amanda realizes that if they can push over the tree, light will flood the amphitheater, destroying the living dead. She and Josh manage to topple the tree and free their parents. As the family gets ready to flee the town, a new family arrives, seemingly brought to the house by the dark forces that power the town.