R.L. STEIN'S 'SAFE SCARES'

I was well into adulthood when author R.L. Stine launched his remarkable series of horror novels for young adults. Even when I was younger, I always sought out the "real deal" for my spooky books, so it's hard to tell if I would have taken the bait on these. Still, Stine's tales have enthralled generations of young readers looking for what he calls "safe scares", those that offer chills and thrills without overly-terrifying content.

In this interview in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal, Stein takes a look back at his successful career scaring the pants off kids (and maybe a few adults, too).

Writer R.L. Stine Is a Master of ‘Safe Scares’

For 30 years, his bestselling Goosebumps novels have offered ‘rollercoaster’ thrills for readers under 12

By Emily Bobrow | Oct. 28, 2022 12:27 | wsj.com

Robert Lawrence Stine always knew he was a writer. He was nine years old when he dragged his family’s typewriter into his room, where he spent most afternoons banging away at stories and jokes. “My parents were kind of horrified,” he recalls over video from his home in Manhattan. “My father would say, ‘What’s wrong with you? Go outside and play! Stop typing!’ It was the worst advice I ever got.”

As one of the bestselling children’s authors in the world, Mr. Stine has had the last laugh—or ghoulish cackle. His scary stories for young readers—including the Goosebumps series, which turned 30 this year—have sold nearly 500 million copies in 24 languages and spawned many adaptations for the big and small screen, including a Disney+ Goosebumps series that started filming this month. At 79, he still publishes several books a year: “Stinetinglers,” a collection of spooky short stories, appeared in August, followed by the novel “Slappy, Beware!” in September.

Scaring kids is actually a second act for Mr. Stine, who spent the first two decades of his career writing joke books and a humor magazine.

“I don’t know why I still enjoy it so much,” Mr. Stine says of his indefatigable productivity. “I just came from three days at New York’s Comic Con, and there were all these people coming up to me saying, ‘I wouldn’t be a librarian today or a writer today if it wasn’t for you.’ It’s so touching.”

Scaring kids is actually a second act for Mr. Stine, who spent the first two decades of his career writing joke books and a humor magazine, under the name Jovial Bob Stine. His first young-adult horror novel, “Blind Date,” topped bestseller lists in 1986, and he never looked back. “The success was so exhilarating. I thought, forget the funny stuff, I’m going to be scary now,” he says.

He adds that it is a little easier to write scary because “everyone has a different sense of humor, but we all have the same fears. Kids are all afraid of the dark, afraid of being lost, afraid of being in a new place. Those fears never change.” He speaks from experience: “I was just scared of everything.” Growing up by the railroad tracks on the edge of a fancy suburb of Columbus, Ohio, he always imagined something was lurking in wait in the closet or garage: “It’s not a good way to be a kid, but remembering that feeling sure came in handy later.”

The adults in Mr. Stine’s novels tend to be oblivious or unhelpful. “Either they don’t believe the kids, or they’re not there, which makes it scarier because the kids are on their own,” he observes. Here, too, he says he is writing from what he knew. His father unloaded trucks in a warehouse and “never read a word I wrote,” Mr. Stine says. His mother “was one of those people who say, ‘Don’t climb that tree or you’ll break your leg, don’t go swimming or you’ll drown. Some of that sticks with you,” he says. “I was in junior high when I realized I was the adult, which was kind of liberating.”

Mr. Stine’s first love was comic books. “‘Tales from the Crypt,’ ‘Vault of Horror,’ those comics really influenced my writing,” he says. “The stories were gruesome, and they always had a funny twist ending, which is what I try to do.” A librarian nudged him toward the work of Ray Bradbury, “which turned me into a reader,” he says. “I went on to read science fiction and fantasy books. It was world-broadening.”

Years later, he got the chance to meet Bradbury at a book festival. “I was so nervous, I was shaking. I said, ‘Mr. Bradbury, you’re my hero.’ He turned around, shook my hand and said, ‘You’re a hero to a lot of people.’ You know how some moments are too nice? That was a too-nice moment. I was thrown.”

The first person in his family to go to college, Mr. Stine lived at home while studying English at Ohio State University, where he edited the humor magazine. He graduated in 1965 and moved to New York with dreams of writing comic novels for adults—“but of course no adult wants a humorous novel,” he says. At a party in Brooklyn he met his wife Jane, an editor and writer; they have been married for more than 50 years and have a son and two grandchildren. Mr. Stine says he still loves the city as much as he did when he first arrived: “When I take my dog for a walk, I see more people than anyone else sees in a month. As my wife always says, ‘In New York, the show is free.’”

To pay rent, Mr. Stine took any kind of writing job he could get, from inventing interviews for celebrity slicks to covering “flip-top cans and new syrups” at Soft Drink Industry magazine. In 1969 he answered a classified ad for a post at Scholastic Inc., where he spent the next 16 years writing and editing magazines, and ran a “very crazy” humor magazine for teenagers called “Bananas” for a decade until it folded. He also wrote adventure books and Bazooka Gum jokes and helped create the Nickelodeon children’s television series “Eureeka’s Castle,” which ran from 1989-91.

“I was at a point in my career where I didn’t say no to anything,” he says, which is how he found himself writing his first young-adult horror book at the request of a Scholastic publisher. At 43, Mr. Stine hadn’t read many scary books: “Don’t print this or anything, but I’m not really into horror,” he admits with a laugh. With some research, however, he sensed he could carve out a niche by making his books “simpler, cleaner and easier to read.”

Although his novels for teen readers contain plenty of blood—“people love it when you kill off teenagers,” he quips—they avoid real-world terrors like school shootings and divorce. For his Goosebumps novels, which are meant for readers under 12, he drops the body count to nil. The goal for these books is to create what Mr. Stine calls “safe scares”: “It’s like a roller coaster. Kids get on and know there will be thrills, but it’s going to let them off OK.” He once experimented with an unhappy ending, but “the mail was unbelievable,” he says. “So many kids wrote, ‘Dear R.L. Stine, you idiot! You moron! How could you write that?’ It haunted me, so I had to write a sequel to finish it.”

Hundreds of books into his horror-writing career, Mr. Stine still arrives at his desk at 10 a.m. most mornings and doesn’t get up until he has written 1,500 words. “It’s like factory work,” he insists. “I really enjoy it.” He notes that the real world is often a scary and complicated place, so his hours at his desk are often the best part of his day. The hardest part, he says, is coming up with cliffhanger chapter endings to keep the kids reading: “They have to read one more chapter, one more chapter. It’s a cheap gimmick, but it really works.”