Pumpkin Juice

Pumpkin Juice is a short story written by R.L. Stine and published in "Still More Tales to Give You Goosebumps".

Plot Summary

On Halloween night, best friends Charlie and Frank decide to make a concoction called pumpkin juice, using a recipe from a booklet called "Monster Brews to Bring Out the Best in You on Halloween". The recipe calls for the flesh of a ripe pumpkin, milk, molasses, butter, garlic, and chicken broth.

When the two are finished making the pumpkin juice, they are at first put off by how disgusting it looks. But once they taste it, they finish downing two glasses each. After, the two start their trick-or-treating, when they suddenly gain large hungers. They start to eat every piece of candy they get, until they start fighting one another for it. Charlie then breaks into a person's house and starts to devour the owner's food. That's when Charlie notices that he has fur growing over his body, and realizes that booklet didn't promise to bring out the "best" in them, it promised to bring out the "beast" in them!

When the angry woman whose home Charlie had just broken into kicks him out, he sees a worm in the ground and eats it. He tries to gain enough self control to try and find Frank and figure a way to reverse what the pumpkin juice did to them. When they get back to Charlie's house where they made the batch of pumpkin juice, Frank tries to eat Charlie's cat, Scout, but Charlie stops him from doing so. When they find the booklet, they look in a section called "Remedies and Cures", and the remedy for pumpkin juice says that for it to work they need pumpkin flesh from the same pumpkin the juice was made from. But the kitchen had been wiped clean since they left!

When hope seems lost, Charlie's mom tells them that she had used the rest of the pumpkin flesh to make a pie, and to their luck the pie contains the rest of the remedy ingredients. Charlie and Frank devour the entire pie and they revert to normal. However, Charlie's mom tells them that she drank some of the leftover pumpkin juice, and now she's starting to feel "real" hungry.