"You" and your friends Patty and Brad sneak into the annual carnival one night, which is still set up. But while poking around, "you" meet Big Al, the carnival's creepy manager. He invites you to "test" the rides, games and other attractions before the big opening. Only the events aren't like at a normal carnival, and your very life is at stake...
It was later followed by a sequel, Return to the Carnival of Horrors.
The Snake Lady from this book would later show up for a quick cameo in the 2015 movie.
Escape from the Carnival of Horrors provides examples of:
- Amusement Park of Doom: The Carnival of Horrors itself, which is full of dangers.
- And I Must Scream: Many endings are this:
- One ending has you get immobilized by a perfume, and you're taken away by carnival workers as a dummy for a space display.
- Another one has you being sent to a space mission to Mars against your will, because you have the right weight for that. The recorded message says that they will bring you back in about twenty years, with a margin of error of about ten years if something goes wrong.
- Another ending has you sliding on the aptly-named Doom Slide for the rest of your life. The mysterious voice who even tells you this just to add insult to injury lampshades this:"Welcome to the rest of your life. Welcome to the Doom Slide."
- Be the Ball: One ending forces you to play volley ball with some monsters. Guess what position you play?
- The Dog Bites Back: One of the good endings involves you using a hard-to-earn Monster Blood to defend yourself and your friends from the enemies who decide to kill you even though you win The Final Challenge. Said item does more than just killing your enemies, it destroys the protective wall and the entrance gate as well, allowing you and your friends to leave safely.
- Failure Is the Only Option: There are several moments where you are locked into Bad Ending.
- If you arrive at Reptile Petting Zoo, you will lose no matter what you do. You can be trapped there and become prey for the reptiles, or avoid getting devoured by petting one of the reptiles but later be forced by the Big Bad to enter the Final Challenge without the essential item to ensure your survival.
- Essential item mentioned above is "Monster Blood", the only weapon you can use to defeat the Big Bad which can be won in one of the carnival games. Progressing to the Final Challenge without it will force you to run away from the Big Bad and eventually lock you in various Bad Ending scenarios.
- Fauxshadowing: In one event, you can encounter a skeleton who warns you not to enter the House of Horrors or you'll end up like him, but none of the bad endings result in you becoming a skeleton. In the sequel, Return to the Carnival of Horrors, it is possible to become a skeleton if the wrong path is taken, but this has nothing to do with the House of Horrors at all.
- Fission Mailed: In the section where you encounter a series of slides, with one of slides forcing you to stay on the slide for the rest of your life being the appropriately named Doom Slide, all three choices tell you that you might have selected the Doom Slide. In reality, only one has a definitive ending, the other 2 still allow you to turn to continue, revealing that, yes, you did not select the Doom Slide.
- Forced Transformation: One ending sees you using the wrong spell in an attempt to escape Slappy and Mr. Wood, which turns you into a chicken.
- Foreshadowing:
- The page where you notice that the dummies in the space display seem real foreshadows the bad ending where you inhale a perfume that immobilizes you, and then some carnival workers come get you to use you as one of the dummies.
- In one of the storylines, you enter a house where you're surrounded by people in old-fashioned suits. When a lady with a red parasol reveals to you that the only way to escape the Carnival of Horrors is to exit before midnight, you ask her how to do it, only for her to say "There's only one right way.", and suddenly the rest of the crowd starts chanting "Only one right way!" until the house and all those people vanish. The train car you must get into to reach the good ending has "Right-Way Railroad" written in the front, and it itself foreshadows you're about to reach the good ending.
- Guide Dang It!: In one part of the story, you have to play the Wheel of Fortune, which is a Luck-Based Mission. Getting bad spins leads to either instant bad ending or unwinnable situations, and other spins leads to you getting points, and there is an especially good spin which earns you a special prize named Monster Blood. The book does not tell you about how many points you need to earn, and the book allows you to progress to the next challenge as soon as possible, provided you don't get a bad spin. It does not really matter how many points you earn as long as you obtain Monster Blood as a prize, which is important to get one of the good endings.
- Hall of Mirrors: There's one of these in the House of Horrors, and it is possible to get lost in there forever, which is represented by forcing you to keep turning back-and-forth between the same two pages for the rest of your life (or at least until you close the book and start the whole adventure over)!
- Intercontinuity Crossover:
- Slappy and Mr. Wood get to make you their slaves in one ending.
- Monster Blood appears in one ending, where it appears and is instrumental in helping "you" escape.
- The Doom Slide was also one of the attractions in One Day At Horrorland.
- Morton's Fork: You may encounter Slappy, the evil dummy from the Night of the Living Dummy books in the main Goosebumps series. You will then be asked if you remember the spell that was used to wake Slappy in the books. Whatever happens next ends badly for you: the wrong spell turns you into a chicken, while the right spell causes you to be enslaved to Slappy. Even if you have a secret code from a fortune teller that allows you to escape Slappy, that code will lead you to a page where you use an impaired time machine and get trapped in a permanent loop.
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Nintendo Hard: While not the hardest, this book has only two good endings while some other books have at least three. Especially hard with both good endings require decent dosage of luck. - No Ending: In one path, you may find yourself traveling through a labyrinth with no end in sight until you hear a voice. You turn towards it, travel down another never ending tunnel until you hear another voice ... and turn back the way you came.
- Not My Driver: A bad ending has an aquatic variant. You are saved from drowning by what turns out to be a monster who will eat you for a midnight snack.
- Snake People: Among the carnival's sideshow freaks you might run into includes the Snake Lady, who will attempt to make you part of the freaks.
- Stupidity Is the Only Option: At the beginning of the book, you're given the option of having some common sense and decide to go home instead of exploring the carnival. If you choose that option, the narrations outright tells you that it's a good thing for you that Patty makes all the decisions, or otherwise you would never have fun, and you'll get to the page you'd have turned to in the first place if you have chosen to explore the carnival.
- Violation of Common Sense: This being a carnival of horrors, waiting for help when the rollercoaster suddenly stops will lead to a bad ending. You must leave it on your own.
