Scaring Little Kids For Twenty Years

Marilyn Thiele

Every now and then, I read about something that takes me back to what seem to be simpler times. This week it was the 20^th anniversary of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series. When the first book in the original series, which ultimately ran to 62 books, appeared in the summer of 1992, my son was 9 years old, right in the center of the target market, kids age 7 -12. (Scarier than any of the stories – this means he’s 29, and that means I’m ---! Ouch!) The world, at least in memory, was less complicated. The Soviet threat was gone; economic ups and downs seemed less extreme and shorter lived, and the boy was somewhat self-sufficient but had not yet hit adolescence.

My son and his friends waited anxiously for the newest Goosebumps book; they were released monthly, and the boys traded and shared them. After a while, I got curious about the appeal of these stories, and decided to read one. I had heard the complaints from adults that they were not educational, that the sentences were short and simple and the vocabulary limited. Those criticisms didn’t bother me. I felt that reading should sometimes be fun, not work; seeing boys that age pick up books for pleasure gave me hope that they would grow up to be readers. The volume I picked up was about a boy living on a farm where some of the animals were being killed by a predator; as the attacks continued, all the evidence pointed to a werewolf as the culprit. I was sure that at the end an explanation for the attacks would appear involving “real world” creatures, maybe just an ordinary wolf. No – it really was a werewolf. I felt cheated, as if the author couldn’t bother to come up with a realistic ending. Why, I wondered, were these reasonably intelligent young boys so entranced with such cheap plots?

It was not just boys who happened to be 9 years old in 1992 who were fascinated with Goosebumps. I bought a small used book store in 1999, and through its years of growth and expansion to a full service store with both new and used books, one thing I have been able to count on is the eternal appeal of this series. Used children’s books tend to appear for trade-in in very large batches. It was time to clean the room, or to go off to college, or to move out, or Mom just got fed up with all the stuff. Many older children’s series don’t sell. Forget Bioncles, Sweet Valley High, Animorphs, and anything based on a TV show. Yet I love to see the full collections of Goosebumps come in; they are barely on the shelf before they are sold. They have to be in very bad physical condition for me to turn them away as unsalable. During the period that they were out of print, I had a waiting list for used copies.

Stine is still writing Goosebumps books, as well as young adult and adult horror. And they are still selling, although not quite at the levels that they did in the 1990s. In an interview with Jen Doll of TheAtlanticWire.com, Stine commented that he is a fan of the “paperback model” of book publishing, where a series’ entries are as frequent as monthly and cost only a few dollars. The original Goosebumps books were priced at $3.99.  Part of the appeal for my son and his friends was that they could buy a book by themselves with their own money; they felt independent. Now, so many books for young people are appearing in hardcover for $17 to $18, and as trilogies, that it is unusual for a child to make the purchase without parental guidance and funding. One great pleasure for me is to see a young child come in to my store clutching a few dollars and heading for the used children’s books, where they can still “do it by myself.”

The wide appeal of Goosebumps for the middle grade reader is still a mystery. Stine says simply that kids like to be scared. In an interview in the August 6 issue of Newsweek, he comments that another magazine had called him a “training bra for Stephen King.” Not every young fan of the Goosebumps series goes on to be a fan of adult horror fiction. They grow up with preferences for romance, or mystery, or literary fiction, or nonfiction, the whole spectrum of reading choices. My own son graduated from Goosebumps to Redwall, a fantasy series, but one filled with medieval chivalry and animals as characters (also complex sentences and vocabulary that sent him to the dictionary). He has now reached the summit of reading taste, having become a fan of crime fiction. Looking back, I think the appeal was being scared, but being scared by things a 9-year-old knows are not real. The middle grade years seem on the surface to be a placid time, but children at that age are moving from a sheltered life to a greater awareness of the world around them. They are expected to take more responsibility, at home and at school. Not everybody is nice to them, or thinks they’re cute. They have to cope with peers in situations where there are no adults to intervene, and learn to navigate their social realm. It has to be scary! A book with a truly horrible creature is an opportunity to feel fear in an acceptable way, at the same time knowing that the feared creature is not real.

So thank you Mr. Stine. For giving my son a chance to choose and buy books on his own. For helping to teach him that reading can be just for fun.  For letting him just be scared. I’m sorry I didn’t like your books, but I’m glad I let him keep reading them. And that other 9-year-olds still are.

 

Comments

[DP Lyle]

And Bob Stine is one of the nicest people on Earth.

DP Lyle

[Mario R.]

Goosebumps is simply the modern equivalent of the fairy tale, aimed at an audience [deeming itself] too old for fairy tales. A naturalistic explanation would have been out of place. When the kid is older, (s)he moves on to horror (perhaps), or possibly even back to fairy tales -- the original ones, where Cinderella's nasty step-sisters cut off their toes or their heels to force their feet into the glass slippers, and Little Red Ridinghood actually does get eaten, i.e. killed, at the end. --Mario R.