My first Goosebumps book
For a spooky kid like me, creepy books were among my gateway drugs into harder stuff like Tales from the Crypt and Halloween (1978). So when I spotted the first Goosebumps book, Welcome to Dead House, on a store shelf in July 1992, I had to have it. By the time we got to a restaurant, my family’s next stop after the bookstore, I was several chapters in. R.L. Stine’s formula was to throw preteen characters into familiar horror scenarios, below the intensity of “grownup” material but twisted enough to appeal to kids with a growing penchant for the macabre. Kids, in other words, like me. I was pleasantly surprised with how dark Dead House got, and I scooped up the subsequent installments, like Stay Out of the Basement (just what is Margaret and Casey’s father up to with his plant experiments?) and The Haunted Mask (could it be that Carly Beth’s new monster mask is possessing her?). I dug not just the plotlines but the atmospheric painted covers, which had the look of actual photographs. In fact, it really bothered me when the covers got more cartoonish with the likes of The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena and The Cuckoo Clock of Doom. But by then, I was on to bigger and better things; when my sixth grade teacher declared she’d no longer accept Goosebumps book reports—“I’m so tired of these! They’re all about kids who do things they shouldn’t be doing!” she railed—I had nothing to worry about. I’d done mine on Stephen King’s Night Shift collection.
Still, the Goosebumps books hold a special place in my heart and memories. My Halloween mask the year Haunted Mask was released jumped out at me because it looked like the one on the cover. When Stine appeared at a children’s book event in Boston years ago, a college friend and I eagerly went to see the man in person. We’re clearly not alone in our fandom. If It Were Stine is a clever Tumblr blog that reimagines horror classics as Goosebumps books, complete with covers and descriptions; The Shining, for instance, becomes Five Months in Horror Hotel: “Why is Danny’s dad acting so weird? And what is in room 237?” Last year the horror website Bloody Disgusting posted a heavy metal cover of the Goosebumps TV theme, and a colleague of mine was amused when a Lucas Films porn star he interviewed told him Goosebumps were his favorite books.
Today I Know What You Did Last Summer producer Neil H. Moritz releases a Goosebumps movie starring Jack Black as Stine himself, in a meta plot involving the author’s characters coming to life. Sounds like an odd approach that could land Goosebumps in the ever growing pile of botched children’s adaptations, though the fact that visionary (and queer) writer/director Mike White co-wrote the screenplay is encouraging. Either way, the film’s success or failure isn’t likely to tarnish fan’s memories of the seminal books—which remain in print two decades later.
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