"You" have been given a new web crawler, Spyder, which turns out to be a real monster. Now it's bitten and infected you with a memory-erasing bug, and you must hurry up and find a cure.
The Spyder, as well as the supporting character Rachel, will later reappear in Goosebumps HorrorTown in an event named after the book.
This book provides examples of:
- Admiring the Abomination: One of the endings sees you, alongside Rachel the hacker girl, capturing the Spyder alive and returning to reality. But then Rachel thinks the Spyder is cute and decides to adopt it.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Spyder originates as a web program before coming to life, and now intends to infect all humans before helping computers take over the world. In several bad endings, he actually succeeds.
- And Then John Was a Zombie: More than one bad ending have you and your friend Mark turning into Spyders yourself, where you're then assimilated into the Internet to infect more people.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The best cure of the Spyder virus turns out to be soup made of pig's knuckles, fish heads, sheep's eyeballs, Brussels sprouts, and computer chips.
- Cassette Futurism: Having been published in 1999, the book has a very retrofuturistic description of virtual reality, just like people have dreamed of in the 1990s.
- Computer Virus: The Spyder, a web-crawler, originates as a sentient, hyper-intelligent virus before gaining a mind of it's own and invading your world through your computer.
- Cyberspace: One of the sub-plots is set in there, after the Spyder drags you in. You'll need to obtain help from a hacker named Rachel to guide you along; lose her and you'll be stuck in cyberspace with no way out.
- Cutting the Knot: Defied; you can choose to leave cyberspace by ripping off your virtual reality goggles, but that will just trap you in cyberspace. Forever.
- Digital Abomination: Spyder, a living computer virus that manifests itself as a spider/octopus hybrid in the real world that leaves toxic slime all around. It bites the main character, causing them to have amnesia.
- Empty Shell: Spending too much time on the Internet will have the Spyder's infection on you completing it's course, turning you into a human-shaped shell. Even if you escape, you won't have your memory, or the ability to move about, and can only spend the rest of your life looking into a monitor screen and drooling like an idiot.
- 419 Scam: One ending has you getting a messaging saying the sender can help you win the lottery, if they what they say. Despite this being framed very much like one of these, this ending is presented as good.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: The Spyder, for starters, escapes from the Internet and emerged using your computer's monitor as a portal to infect humans with a virus. There's also a bad ending where you accidentally let loose a virtual dog from the Internet who then comes out your monitor and devours you.
- Hackette: You enlist the help of a hacker girl named Rachel to navigate the web and defeat the Spyder.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia:
- The first of several side-effects from getting bitten by the crawler. You'll lose your memory at a rapid pace, either turning into an Empty Shell or devolving into another sentient virus.
- One of the (ambiguous) endings sees you destroying your computer in a last-ditch attempt at containing the Spyder. It works, but then your mother caught you destroying the computer she just bought you, at which point she declares You Are Grounded!... just as she suddenly hits her head and conveniently forgets everything, right up to the part about destroyed computers.
- Mad Scientist: Dr. Bronstein, the scientist who developed the Spyder program, and unfortunately you'll need to enlist his help in one of the paths. His alignment is ambiguous though — Bronstein could be evil or neutral, depending on the choices you make.
- Octopoid Aliens: Variant, but the Spyder is an octopoid sentient virus monster.
- Recursive Canon: Your character apparently has multiple GYG books in their room, as seen on the front cover (on the right side next to the monitor). A poster depicting the cover of It's Only a Nightmare! is also visible behind the monitor.
- Schrödinger's Gun: When you get infected by a computer virus, you can turn for help either to doctor Bronstein or to a hacker girl called Rachel. In one subplot, they genuinely want to help you, while in another they just want to use you for their evil purposes. In one more subplot, it turns out that the monster that infected you is not actually evil, and the virus can be cured with just a hot bath.
- Too Good to Be True: As it turns out, the Spyder originates from a program you installed for free. Your bestie Mark lampshades that it's "too shady" for a free program, there must be some catch to it.
