R.L.stine: I was having a good time killing off teenagers

Jared Bland posted an excellent overview of Goosebumps Horroland event, so I feel like sharing it with you.

In a few words:

I can speak to the quality of the first book, and the good news for R.L. Stine fans is that it’s everything you would expect from a new Goosebumps. Classic kid topics, like cousin hatred, are covered with aplomb: “I like to make lists. And if I made a list of My Top 5,000 Favorite People in the World, my cousin Ethan wouldn’t be on it.” Injustice, too: “So now I had to sleep in Mom’s sewing room. And the sewing machine was still against the wall. So how much room did I have? Try not much.” And thanks to the surly living dummy, a cache of jokes that will be instantly added to the ten-year-old’s lexicon: “‘I like your long hair,’ Mr. Badboy said to me. ‘Too bad it’s all growing on your back!’” Indeed, Mr. Badboy. (Stine’s characters are, as always, lovely in their kidishness. I don’t know how good they are as representations of actual children, but they’re certainly perfect as articulations of what we think about when we think about kids.)

On Tuesday the New York Times ran a story announcing that young adult novelist R.L. Stine would be resuming his vaguely legendary series, Goosebumps, after an eight-year hiatus. Somewhere near you, a twelve-year-old rejoiced. (An eighteen-year-old did too, I’d wager, as they’ll be the ones with acute nostalgia once they see the new books on the shelves.)

The Times story is charming, the sort of piece about a gently strange man that, when stripped to soundbites, sounds profoundly bizarre: “Along the wall of Mr. Stine’s home office are testaments to the brand’s glory: a ‘Goosebumps’ chocolate Advent calendar”; “Under the name Jovial Bob Stine, he was the author of dozens of joke books in the 1970s and ’80s”; “‘They’re so shiny,’ he said. ‘They’ve got to be shiny now’”; and, best of all, “‘I was having a good time killing off teenagers,’ Mr. Stine said.”

Cut-and-paste fun aside, Stine offers insight into his return to the ‘Bumps: “‘I spent eight years trying to think of a title as good as ‘Goosebumps,’ he said. But he never did.” There’s something admirable about Stine’s honesty here. He has spent these eight years, after all, churning out a few different series, none of which has had nearly the success of Goosebumps. Right now, it seems to me, the man wants to get paid. And that’s an understandable thing.

And so Scholastic gives us HorrorLand:



Seems simple enough, right? But here’s where it gets complicated. When I quoted Stine talking about the idea of shininess above, he was referring to the cover of the first book in the new series, Revenge of the Living Dummy. But it’s not just the cover that’s shiny here, it’s the concept, too. I have tried really hard to understand exactly what the hell is going on in this series, but I’m still not entirely sure I get it. The Times explains it like this: “The children in the first book are invited to the park [HorrorLand], where they discover a werewolf petting zoo, bottomless canoes, a quicksand beach and other wicked attractions. Their misfortunes will be chronicled in serial form in 30-page installments at the end of the subsequent books, which will focus on different characters.”

To me, that sounds complicated, and basically like a bad idea. If you’ll recall the excellent summer of 1996 during which Stephen King’s The Green Mile was published in monthly installments, this would sort of be like tacking on an extra and completely unrelated hundred-or-so-page story to the beginning of books two through six. That just doesn’t make much sense.

But it turns out it’s even more complicated. I cannot even begin to think about knowing how to explain this myself, so I will quote the press release for Revenge of the Living Dummy: “In a Goosebumps first, HorrorLand will be a serialized adventure. The story won’t end on the final page of book one, Revenge of the Living Dummy, or in book two, Creep from the Deep. Instead, the terrifying adventures will continue at www.enterhorrorland.com and in books three to twelve. Readers will be compelled to unlock the sinister answer to all of this terror. By reading the books and interacting with the website they will find themselves also trapped in the theme park, which becomes more and more horrific with each book. Who—or WHAT—is behind the evil plot to assemble these kids? The answer will only be revealed in book twelve.”

Perhaps this is a brilliant, zany marketing scheme just out there enough to work. More likely, it’s a sign of where kids are right now. After all, Britney Crosby, the beleaguered protagonist of Revenge of the Living Dummy, has a cell phone despite being twelve. Maybe this is just what it takes to get kids involved these days. As I neither have one nor know one, I cannot really speak to this.

I can speak to the quality of the first book, and the good news for R.L. Stine fans is that it’s everything you would expect from a new Goosebumps. Classic kid topics, like cousin hatred, are covered with aplomb: “I like to make lists. And if I made a list of My Top 5,000 Favorite People in the World, my cousin Ethan wouldn’t be on it.” Injustice, too: “So now I had to sleep in Mom’s sewing room. And the sewing machine was still against the wall. So how much room did I have? Try not much.” And thanks to the surly living dummy, a cache of jokes that will be instantly added to the ten-year-old’s lexicon: “‘I like your long hair,’ Mr. Badboy said to me. ‘Too bad it’s all growing on your back!’” Indeed, Mr. Badboy. (Stine’s characters are, as always, lovely in their kidishness. I don’t know how good they are as representations of actual children, but they’re certainly perfect as articulations of what we think about when we think about kids.)

And, happily, Stine’s spooky instincts are intact. Consider his opening—“You may wonder why my best friend, Molly Molloy, and I were in the old graveyard late at night.”—which sets a creepy vibe from the start and is even further terrifying in that R.L. Stine is evidently able to conceive of a situation wherein one wouldn’t want to know what these girls were up to in the graveyard. The story itself centres around the re-emergence of and fight against Slappy, a possessed dummy whom you’ll recall from Night of the Living Dummy and its sequels II and III, Goosebumps 2000: Bride of the Living Dummy, and Goosbumps 2000: Slappy’s Nightmare. Slappy, as you can probably imagine, turns out to be a bad dude, as Britney discovers while doing research in a folder marked VENTRILOQUISM found in the attic workroom of Molly’s father, who, thank God, happens to be a professor of folklore. Choice cut: “‘It says the dummy’s real name is Slappy,’ I told Molly. ‘And—I was right! He’s totally evil!’”

(To learn more about Slappy, you should pickup the reissue of Night of the Living Dummy that is being published as part of a group of classic Goosebumps timed to accompany the new titles. It contains a handy ‘Fright Gallery’ in its appendix, which is sort of a Dungeons & Dragons-style assessment of Slappy’s origins, powers, and other particulars. I think everyone can agree that the books are better if you understand that “[s]ome people believe that Slappy has the power to control people’s minds and turn people into puppets,” that his Hobbies & Interests include “[d]aydreaming about what he’ll do when he becomes the Supreme Ruler of the Human Race,” that he rates ten out of ten for humour in the Splat Stats section (though a mere six splats for Attack Skills), and that he was made “a thousand times ruder” by the demise of Mr. Wood, his brother dummy who was carved from the same stolen coffin by “an ancient sorcerer” in the late 1800s.)

In the Times piece, Stine worried about whether the series would catch the imagination of kids in the same way today: “‘Maybe it’ll be hard to do a second time,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’ll happen again. Right now I don’t know.’” Based on Revenge of the Living Dummy, which really is a fun and fast-paced read, I think he’ll be just fine. And if they can figure out the bells and whistles, the kids will be alright, too