R.L. Stine
Celebrates 30 Years of Giving Kids Goosebumps
by Melissa Fales
No one is more surprised that the aptly named children’s horror book series, Goosebumps, continues to thrill young readers 30 years after its debut than the author of the books himself, R.L. Stine. In those 30 years, Stine has written over 150 Goosebumps books which have sold more than 400 million copies, making it one of the most successful children’s series of all time. “Thirty years of this stuff?” Stine jokes. “How did that happen? When we started out, I thought maybe I’d write two or three books. And I didn’t even want to do it in the first place. My Fear Street series was doing well, and I was afraid Goosebumps would mess that up. That’s the kind of businessman I am.” To mark the occasion, Scholastic is releasing two books; Goosebumps SlappyWorld #17: Haunting with the Stars and Slappy, Beware!
Stine grew up in Ohio and moved to New York City after college. “I wanted to work on a funny magazine, like Mad, and write funny novels,” he says. Instead, Stine found himself writing for a soft drink industry trade magazine and typing up fictitious interviews with movie stars for a celebrity magazine. Later, Scholastic hired him, and he created a magazine called Bananas. “It was my life’s dream to have my own national humor magazine,” he says. “That was my life’s goal and I had reached it at age 28.”
Fortuitously, Stine had lunch with Scholastic’s editorial director Jean Feiwel on a day when she was fed up with the antics of an author she had been working with on a teen horror novel called Blind Date. Frustrated, Feiwel asked Stine to take a stab at it instead. “I didn’t know what she was talking about when she mentioned ‘teen horror’ but at that point in my career, I wasn’t going to say no,” says Stine. “It’s embarrassing, but being scary wasn’t even my idea. All I had ever cared about was being funny.” Blind Date went on to be a bestseller and a year later, when Stine wrote another teen horror novel, Twisted, that one was a bestseller too. “I thought, Forget the funny stuff, and I’ve been scary ever since,” Stine says.
In 1989, Stine released the first book in his Fear Street series. It’s still popular today, with Netflix releasing three movies based on the books just last summer. “Those movies have introduced me to a whole new audience,” says Stine. The success of Fear Street led to the idea of Stine creating scary stories for younger readers. Stine required a lot of convincing, but the series was an immediate hit. The first Goosebumps book, Welcome to Dead House, was the start of an entire Goosebumps empire that would grow to include not only the 150 books, but also a top-rated television show, video games, an attraction at Disney World, and two feature films.
Stine modestly credits much of his success with Goosebumps to luck, but he admits the format of the books is particularly kid-friendly. “They’re not challenging as far as the reading goes,” he says. “There are no vocabulary words. I don’t try to teach them any new words. There are short chapters with cliffhanger endings that keep them reading. And it’s all plot. No characters. I get criticized for that a lot, but I want the reader to be the protagonist, I think that makes it scarier.”
In order to be as prolific as Stine has been with the Goosebumps books, he’s adopted a strict regimen when it comes to work. “I write 2,000 words per day,” he says. “I have this game with myself; when I hit 2,000 words I stop. Mid-sentence, I’ll quit. I’m out of here. It’s like factory work.”
Over the 30 years he’s written the series, Stine has perfected his technique and figured out just how to write a book that will scare children enough, but not so much that they are no longer entertained. “It’s just the opposite of writing for adults,” he says. “With adults, every detail has to be real, or they won’t buy the horror. It has to seem like it could really happen. But my number one rule for Goosebumps is that the kids who are reading the book have to know it’s a fantasy. When you do that, you can go pretty far with the scares.”
Case in point: Stine’s popular Slappy character, an evil ventriloquist dummy. Stine considers the upcoming release Slappy, Beware! special because it’s only the second Goosebumps book to be published as a hardcover. Plus, it includes four full-page pieces of illustrations. “We’ve never had an illustrated Goosebumps book before,” says Stine. Slappy, Beware! is due out September 20.
Stine jokes about coming up with new material for books about Slappy. “How many plots can there be about an evil dummy that comes to life?” he asks. Slappy, Beware! is the creepy character’s origin story. “There are all these different rumors as to how he got started,” says Stine. “Some say he was carved out of haunted coffin wood or that he escaped from a puppet factory in Cincinnati. But this book tells the true story, and it goes back to about 200 years ago. I make up all my true stories.”
While Stine is happy to commemorate 30 years of Goosebumps, he’s certainly not afraid to try anything new. Stinetinglers, a book of all new scary short stories written by Stine, is set to debut later this summer. “There are ten short stories in the first book,” he says. “We’ll be releasing one book a year after that.” This September, look for Stuff of Nightmares, a set of four comic books for adults that Stine worked on in collaboration with BOOM! Studios. “It’s my version of Frankenstein,” says Stine. And next year, look for a new book by Stine and Marc Brown of Arthur fame. Longtime friends, Stine and Brown have previously released two books together: Little Shop of Horrors and Mary McScary. “Arthur was the first thing Marc ever did and it was a huge success,” says Stine, incredulously. “He never struggled. He never got rejection slips. This year I may be celebrating 30 years of Goosebumps, but he’s celebrating 45 years of Arthur, and he’s younger than me!”
For more information about R.L. Stine and Goosebumps, visit rlstine.com.