With the Jack Black-starring film adaptation of Goosebumps currently doing good business at the box office, we decided to look at the original series with our decidedly adult eyes and see what holds up and what doesn’t. At their best, Stine’s books channel the kind of banal-turned-horrific you find in Stephen King’s work, albeit for kids (more mischief and less mutilation). My mom taught me how to read, and engendered a lifetime fascination with the macabre, by reading me Edgar Allan Poe when I was a kid I subsequently turned to Stine’s series when I could read competently on my own, and for that I’ll always have a deep appreciation for the Goosebumps books (the original 62, none of those ersatz things he later wrote). You’ll likely remember those varicoloured covers adorned with grotesqueries culled from the wunderkammer imagination of a writer who seemed acutely aware of childhood anxieties, and who took great joy in scaring children witless. If you’re of a certain generation, and if you had a penchant for the perverse at a young age, you probably remember R.
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