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Often
these days whenever I'm talking with other horror geeks,
I hear the common response that they never read RL Stine
when they were children. They were instead reading
Stephen King. Well, for some of us who went to middle
school, the folks that ran it often felt King was beyond
the comprehension of most of its students. That never
stopped me of course from reading "It" and grabbing
amazing books like "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark."
That book, while touted to children, was grotesque,
disgusting, gory, and featured some truly scary stories
that I continue to remember fondly. I'm mad at myself
for not keeping my original copy which was pretty worn
out by the time I was in middle school. I can still
recall sitting in my grade school class in the middle of
the day in a crowded noisy room sweating and panting
while reading the story of the babysitter getting calls
from a man who she later discovers was calling inside
the house of children she was babysitting. I can still
think of myself trying to figure out what a human being
would taste like in one of the stories that involved
cannibalism, and yes, I can still remember cringing at
the gruesome often disturbing but absolutely amazing
illustrations from Stephen Gammell whose vivid paintings
and pictures of clowns from the ground and eyeless
corpses made for some sleepless nights.
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The fact was
that my gateway drug was RL Stine, the man
who wrote such book series as "Goosebumps"
and "Fear Street." Whenever we had our
yearly Scholastic sponsored book fair at our
school, his books were always the hot buys
for every student. Every one of my fellow
classmates buzzed around his table looking
for his latest installments and quite often,
they were gobbled up before anyone else
could buy them. Filled with pop up full
color art that depicted scenes from the
books, Stine offered an alternative for kids
and parents that involved stories that
straddled the line of edgy and safe while
also displaying a keen sense of intellect
that never talked down to his readers. While
there was hardly any blood splatter to be
had, he always had a really excellent
surprise ending to add to every single book
he gave us prepubescent readers and that's
why we continue to love him. Sure, I watched
"Twilight Zone," and in my single digits age
I saw films like "Misery," and "Creepshow,"
and often I indulged myself in "Halloween,"
and "Monster Squad," but Stine kept my eyes
glued to books, and I was at a time where I
often found reading to be quite annoying. I
never did it unless I absolutely had to, but
whenever Stine had a book in the shelf of
our school library, I'd pick it up and read
it as fast as I could. Later he released his
more adult and mature "Fear Street" books,
which were not as popular or commercially
appealing as "Goosebumps," but were much
more steeped in violence, sexual themes and
his usual surprise endings and twists.
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"Fear
Street" was often about a certain street where every
single horrific thing occurred involving vampires and
serial killers, while "Goosebumps" often set down on
mild mannered suburban neighborhoods where something out
of the ordinary often happened, thanks to the curiosity
and ill-advised children whom were often punished for
their nosiness or for displaying a mean spirit that
signaled their comeuppance. "Goosebumps," in spite of
being the most commercially appealing of Stine's legacy,
didn't exactly add up to a wonderful television series
when FOX had the bright idea to turn this popular
franchise in to their very own flagship show based on
Stine's name appeal to the youth. Granted, the show did
have its major high points including its adaptation of
"Night of the Living Dummy" which was quite creepy at
times, and the episode involving the mask that would
turn you in to a monster, but at the end of the day the
show "Goosebumps" that aired on FOX Kids daily didn't
quite live up to the clout of the superior children's
horror show "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" from
Nickelodeon.
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That was an
anthology series that brought with it more
twists, more solid production qualities and
much edgier storylines involving vampires,
cannibals, and zombies, three of which
"Goosebumps" never really touched upon.
Nickelodeon's series was most often a show
based around classic urban legends and age
old dilemmas like the Monkey's Paw and the
search for eternal beauty, all the while
engaging in some genuinely horrific
storylines one of which involved a blood
bank and a starving vampire. It's not
surprising since Stine's series aired during
the day on a major kids channel while the
latter aired every weekend during primetime
on Nickelodeon, a channel that was then
still in the midst of blossoming in to a
juggernaut, and was also the only kids
network on cable. So they were allowed to do
much more and pulled off better scares, in
the end. "Goosebumps" was charming, but "Are
you Afraid of the Dark?" often prompted kids
to shut the lights off after seven o'clock,
bunch together under the sheets and shiver
at the latest frights that would inevitably
appear to lull them to sleep on Saturdays. |
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Every
episode was a weekly event while "Goosebumps" was just
amusing in its own little way and nothing more. Stine
seemed to know though that kids would seek out scary
stories, whether their parents held them back or not,
and that's a constant fact. Kids, like everyone, love to
be scared and will do whatever they possibly can to seek
out new forms of scaring people, even reading books that
offer them new yarns and ghouls, and Stine relied on
such a massive craving by providing us with meals that
were appetizing but healthy. Stine of course also
offered up the classic storyteller warning "Reader
Beware: You're in for a Scare" which always kept his
audience wanting more and more. The television series,
while entertaining enough, never did accomplish what our
imaginations did for us, which was offer a much darker
and dreadful world than G rated television shackled down
by the censors ever really could. This is a channel that
censored "Spider-Man"! So any hope of an edgy
"Goosebumps" series was a pipe dream.
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Stine relied
on our imaginations to do the work for us
(with the help of the book's illustration on
the cover), and more times than not that's
what kept us going back. We wanted to
genuinely see what he could scoop in to the
young horror fan's mouths, and he did it
quite well with vivid writing and clever
twists that often relied on the classic
horror tropes of Karma and getting exactly
what you wished for. Stine gave us some
ingenious cappers to some rather twisted
stories and this is the hook that made these
series of books so damn addictive. Who can
forget the big surprise in "The Girl Who
Cried Monster" in which we learn the young
girl's teacher who happens to be a predator
is really just the prey in the end?
Or "Night of
the Living Dummy" that provided a second jab
at our young heroes once they've defeated
the demonic dummy? There's an endless array
of punches to the gut that keep the readers
on constant guard, and Stine reveled in such
big reveals until the commercial viability
of the series wore off. While Stine still
makes appearances on television through old
episodes of "Goosebumps," television movies
"The Haunting Hour" which were entertaining
enough considering they aired on Cartoon
Network a cable channel devoted to keeping
things safe and tame, |
Stine
still has the literary power within the nineties kids
who grew up with his books and realized that
storytelling is still a very volatile skill that can
inspire many kids to indulge in literature and not look
at it as some sort of chore. Hopefully with the proposed
film franchise in the works, kids will be drawn back to
his books, allowing for a new generation of readers and
horror lovers to engage in tales of "Fear Street" and
"Goosebumps," and discover that the horror genre is one
filled with many surprises and wonderful gifts that can
be handed to them by a man like R.L. Stine, who showed a
cynical generation that reading can be cool, and was a
precursor to J.K. Rowling's storming of the gates who
also made reading addictive again in a world of internet
devotees who have grown to hate reading as a hobby and
admit they hate reading with pride. That's just
heartbreaking.
I owe a
lot to many of the horror meisters for making me the
sick bastard that I am today, and RL Stine is definitely
one who kept my eyes glued to the printed page, at a
miserable time of my life where I viewed reading as
nothing more than an intrusive and tedious waste of time
better spent watching TV, or scooping up comic book.
There's still a place for Stine in this horror fan's
heart. |
