Stine, R. L. (1943—)

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Stine, R. L. (1943—)

In just over a decade, R. L. Stine went from being an obscure humor magazine editor to the biggest name in books for youth. Though his achievement is sometimes discounted as a fluke, Stine found a formula and tapped an audience that brought him unprecedented success. Many attribute his success to the great entertainment

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his books provide kids. Like Stephen King, to whom Stine is often compared, Stine knows how to tell a story. He knows how to keep readers interested and involved and, most importantly, how to satisfy them. Stine is not creating well-rounded characters; he is not using symbolism, metaphor, or any of the tricks of the trade in his writing. Instead, he practices the tricks of his own trade: that of entertaining people with "cheap thrills." He uses humor, roller-coaster plots, suspenseful chapter endings, gross-outs, credible kids' dialogue, recognizable if stereotypical characters, cliffhangers and red herrings, and a bare-bones style that gets to the point: to scare his readers. He is not interested in educating, enlightening, or informing; he is only interested in entertaining kids by terrifying them with gruesome, plot twisting, scary thrillers.

Robert Lawrence Stine had been telling and writing scary stories since he was a kid growing up in Columbus, Ohio. He wrote and illustrated his own magazines throughout his school years, then was the editor of the Ohio State humor magazine, The Sundial, during his college years. After a brief stint as a social studies teacher, Stine moved from Ohio to New York to break into the writing business. After a series of short-lived jobs writing for fan magazines and trade industry publications, he landed a job at Scholastic. Within a few years he had moved from a staff writer to editor of the youth humor magazine Bananas. While he was editing Bananas, he was writing joke books like How to Be Funny and The Beast Handbook. Soon after Bananas folded, Stine was downsized at Scholastic and began freelancing fulltime, turning out more joke books, penning numerous Choose Your Own Adventure style multiple storyline books, writing a television show, and even writing bubble gum cards and coloring books. All his work eventually paid off with the success of Fear Street and Goosebumps.

Stine had learned in childhood that he could entertain by telling stories, like those he shared with his brother as they tried to go to sleep at night. He also learned that he could entertain his peers by writing the stories as well. He so enjoyed entertaining his peers that he decided to make a career of it. Stine told People magazine that "I started writing when I was nine. I think I knew then that I wanted to write. I don't really know why. I just always loved it more than anything else." As an adult, Stine described himself as a "writing machine" in USA Today and continues to effectively use what he learned at age nine about how to entertain nine-year-olds.

Stine's first financial success came in 1992 with the debut of his Goosebumps book series for upper elementary/middle school kids. Edited by his wife Jane and packaged through her company Parachute Press, Goosebumps quickly became the most popular children's book series of all time; by the late 1990s there were 180 Goosebumps books in print in over 30 languages. The numbers for Goosebumps products were just as impressive. Additionally, since its debut in 1995, the Goosebumps television show has been a top-rated show and remains a centerpiece in the Saturday morning schedule of the Fox network in 1999; Goosebumps prime-time and after-school specials are rating winners as well. Videos based on the shows have sold over one million copies, while the first CD-ROM based on the books, Escape from Horrorland, was a big seller. The World Wide Web overflows with kids' personal Goosebumps pages, not to mention Scholastic's official site. By 1999, a movie was also in the works with Fox Family Films, while Disney has cashed in with a Goosebumps Horror Land at its Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios site in Florida. It should be of no surprise that the roller coaster plot twister is tied in with an amusement park with an attraction featuring a live Goosebumps show performed five times a day and a Goosebumps Fun House with a scary hall of mirrors. Disney also sponsored a Goosebumps parade and signed Stine for a Goosebumps cruise on the Disney Cruise ships.

Parachute Press had watched Stine's Fear Street series become popular among teens and pre-teens. Parachute and Stine then developed an idea for another scary series, this one to be aimed at younger kids. There still needed to be scares and dangers, but no blood, no guts, no bullets, and no guns. In these books for younger readers Stine played up the humor—another of his strengths—while playing down the violence. In order for the books to be scary, there would still need to be a threat to the character, but the threats would be different—most Fear Street stories are not monster stories and therefore contain an edge of realism.

In his autobiography It Came From Ohio, Stine writes that he saw an advertisement in TV Guide to promote horror films which read, "It's GOOSEBUMPS week." With that, he was off and running, turning out the first title, Welcome to Dead House, in ten days. It was not, however, an instant success. Welcome to Dead House sold less than a million copies. Nor did the next book—Stay Out of the Basement —set the publishing world afire. Like Fear Street before it, Goosebumps was a series without a central set of characters, and in this case, not even a central location. Fear Street also came out after some seeds had been sown by Stine and other authors in books like Twisted. In contrast, there was nothing even remotely like Goosebumps on the market: it was a brand new field. It was not until the third book, Monster Blood, that the series caught on, mostly due to word of mouth. With their easy availability through Scholastic book clubs, the growing number of mega-bookstores, and discount stores like Wal-Mart, Goosebumps soon began selling well. By the sixth title, Let's Get Invisible, Goosebumps cracked Publishers Weekly's children's bestseller chart. The books received a boost in visibility when USA Today began its own bestseller list in 1994. Unlike other rankings that do not include paperbacks or children's books—or if they do include them, they do not compare their sales to adult bestsellers—USA Today's premise was, a book is a book is a book. On USA Today's list, it became obvious that Goosebumps was outselling adult authors like Michael Crichton.

But the bubble burst on February 21, 1997, when Scholastic Inc., publishers of Stine's Goosebumps series, saw its stock drop 40 percent after an announcement that its earnings would not meet expectations. Blame for this dramatic drop fell on the decline in sales figures of the Goosebumps franchise, in particular their older titles. Five years into the life of the series, it had "simply peaked." The wide coverage given to this news—which ended up on the front page of most newspaper business sections—demonstrates the impact and importance of R.L. Stine. One writer, it seems, can influence the fate of an entire company. Stine, however, is not just any writer; he is, without a doubt, the most famous of all writers for children. Perhaps only Judy Blume in her heyday rivals Stine in this regard. He has appeared on countless television shows, helped create two successful television series (Goosebumps and Eureka's Castle), and has been widely written about in the media. His first adult novel—Superstitious (1996)—earned a big advance and a movie deal. Needless to say, in spite of the series' declining sales, the Goosebumps brand name still appears on fast-food drink cups, snack foods, calendars, clothing, and everywhere else in the retail world.

Goosebumps are more than books; they are popular culture products. From the movie tie-ins to the Cheetos bags, Goosebumps stopped being just books very soon into the series and Stine went from hack writer to celebrity in just a few months. Stine told People that "No one over 14 has ever heard of me." By 1998, however, there were few people with any significant contact with kids who had not heard of R.L. Stine.

—Patrick Jones