Goosebumps Month: Recap

 Throughout the month of October, I’ve gone through the sometimes unfortunate task of reading Goosebumps books. It was a choice, I know, and one I was looking forward to early on in the creation of the blog. But that didn’t make it any easier.

You see, throughout doing this blog experiment one thing has constantly been in my mind: tell the funny, embarrassing and nostalgic stories of a time long gone. And revel in the ironic love of all things 90s.

There was honestly no candidate better than R.L. Stine.

But throughout this month I have unfairly painted a hero of my youth with a rather negative brush. In some ways using the genre of “angry” reviewers online who give their rants and raves on things from their own childhoods, I decided to try to approach Goosebumps in a way that only a 25 year old would: with more skepticism than it ever deserved.

This is worse than it
looks, trust me.

For many kids my age during the 90s, Goosebumps was not just a book series, but an obsession. Plenty of kids collected the books just to collect the books without reading most of the ones they had forced their parents to buy (I fell into that category). Even after Goosebumps was no longer publishing or when there was a fear that the fad was dying, we picked up other books that R.L. Stine wrote, or even other horror series with the hope that it would met our needs (knowing they never would, especially the Star Wars “Galaxy of Fear” books I tried next).

Besides, Goosebumps isn’t only one series of books that R.L. Stine has penned. Going through his Wikipedia listing or even looking him up at your local library will show the man has written hundreds of books (of course, Goosebumps is the most popular). The sheer number is noteworthy, and even considering a few clunkers here and there, the fact that he has been named the best selling children’s author ever by Guinness is pretty impressive.

I'll give it that some of the props
in this show were super convincing.

That’s not to say that I do not have some issues with Bob. In the few books I’ve read this month, and the handful of episodes of the TV show I’ve stumbled upon (seriously, try watching cartoon channels during October and all you’ll find are reruns of the show), you could tell there was a point in the series where the ideas began drying up. And I started to notice that some of the books in the middle of the series almost seemed tailor made for TV, with cheaper-to-produce ideas that weren’t found in some of the classics that may have appeared later in the show schedule (I did more than my fair share of Wikipediaing). And while I can complain about the ideas felling a little unimaginative, the cast of characters is so similar between stories there are times where I completely forgot who was who as I read from story to story. (I’m sorry Bob, there are not that many spectacled dog loving gingers in this world, despite what your books try to tell me.)

But for all of my issues, they don’t compare to how important an influence R.L. Stine has proven to be over the years and the countless number of kids he has helped get interested in reading. As an adult going through his library, my criticism is unfair. Through the eyes of 7-year-old me however, R.L. Stine was a great writer whose work had an affect lasting enough that I’m writing about it almost 20 years later.