F
OR MANY YOUNGSTERS GROWING UP IN THE 1990S, R.L. STINE’S STORIES WERE A GATE- WAY TO THE WORLD OF HORROR. He provided pint-sized readers with a kid-safe doorway to the genre through tales of evil ventriloquist dummies, haunted Halloween masks, malevolent ghosts and monsters of nearly every inclination imaginable. Throughout that decade, school book fairs were overrun by works from the author, who has penned almost 150 Goosebumps titles
(aimed at seven- to twelve-year-olds), more than 100 entries in the teen-targeted Fear Street franchise, and dozens of other supernatural young adult novels (including the novelization of Ghostbusters 2). His books have been translated into 32 languages and have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. He’s over- seen successful stage and television adaptations of Goosebumps, was ranked 36th on the Forbes List of Highest Paid Entertainers for 1996/97 (with his income listed at $41 million) and was named the best-sell- ing children’s author of all time by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2003. Yet, during the height of his popularity the unassuming writer kept mostly to himself.
As a result, many have assumed that R.L. Stine is
merely a brand name ghostwritten by dozens of aspir- ing novelists, but that’s not the case. Rue Morgueman- aged to track down the author and discovered a rather humble and cheerful man who is still surprised by the impact his books have had on genre literature, espe- cially considering he never set out to write scary stories. “I started writing horror very late,” admits the 66-
year-old author. “I always wanted to be funny and spent the first part of my career writing joke books for kids as Jovial Bob Stine. I edited a humour magazine for children called Bananas for ten years and then when that folded I went back to freelancing. An editor from Scholastic asked me to write a teen horror novel called Blind Date (1986). She gave me the title and everything. I wrote the book, it came out a month later and was a number one best-seller. I’d never had a best-seller in all my years of writing, so I thought, ‘I’ve stumbled onto something that kids really want to read here. They want to be scared.’ So I’ve been scary ever since.” Stine found the transition from hu-
mour to horror an easy one and con- siders the seemingly contradictory genres to be surprisingly similar. “I never get scared in a movie or
reading a scary book,” he reveals. “Horror always makes me laugh and when you see a scary movie you always hear people laughing as well as screaming, so I think they’re very closely tied together.” The author even discovered that
he was able to apply what he’d learned from writing comedy to his genre work. “I sort of treated it like writing
jokes and punchlines,” he explains. “Every chapter of my books ends with some kind of big shock, and coming up with the cliffhanger at the end of every chapter is like writing a punchline.” Stine’s love of humour and horror can be traced
back to his childhood infatuation with the EC Comics of the ’50s. He found himself drawn to Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and Mad Magazine because they sparked his imagination and “were creepy and really disgusting and funny at the same time” – a combination that he would later try to mimic in his own work. The success of Stine’s early novels led to the cre-
ation of Fear Street, a monthly book series that quickly became a staple of public school libraries. The tales –
about a normal town with a literal Fear Street, which was cursed and had a horrible history – focused on groups of loosely connected teens encountering a va- riety of supernatural occurrences, as well as solving a few conventional murder mysteries. The titles suc- cessfully marketed horror to a teenage audience with- out stirring up too much controversy, as Stine was always careful about staying within the boundaries of good taste. “I tend to be more conservative,” he admits. “My
editors are always saying, ‘Make it scarier. Spice it up. Hype it up.’ I tend to be a little careful with kids. In fact, I hate it when I’m at a bookstore and kids tell me, ‘That book really gave me a nightmare.’ One mother once said to me, ‘Our son had to sleep in our bed for a week after he read that book.’ That’s not good, that’s not really what you want. So my one rule basically is don’t ever let any- thing get too real, make sure that kids know while they’re reading it that it’s fantasy and couldn’t hap- pen. I don’t do any real-world prob- lems. There’s no divorce, there are no drugs or child abuse.” Keeping his material light and fun
yet scary earned Stine popularity with teens, parents and even educators. Though horror was rarely accepted in classrooms and public school li- braries before his breakout success, he found an unexpected ally in teach- ers, who were thrilled that their stu- dents actually wanted to read something. The Fear Street series ultimately
moved some 80 million copies, and before long Stine’s publishers sug- gested that he try gearing his sto- ries toward an even younger audience of seven- to twelve-year- olds, a market virtually untapped by horror at the time. The idea made
Stine nervous; he was worried that it would some- how screw up the momentum of Fear Street. Even- tually the publishers convinced him to take a stab at it, but he had one condition. “I agreed to give it a shot if I could come up with a
good title for a series,” recalls Stine. “I was looking through TV Guide one night and found a little ad that said ‘It’s Goosebumps Week on Channel 11.’ I just stared at the word and thought that would be perfect.” Scholastic commissioned the first four Goosebumps
books in 1992. With the new series, Stine delved deeper into the genre than ever before. While Fear Street had some ghosts and monsters, Goosebumps
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100