THE HORROR OF R.L. STINE

Every month, 1.25 million children buy into Stine’s world, the peaceful neighborhoods where youngsters live in jeopardy, helpless against an assortment of evils. Stine’s older readers (9-14) thrill to the homicidal houses and jealous teenagers of the Fear Street collections. For the very young (ages 8- 12), there are the malicious puppets and robotic camp counselors of the Goosebumps series. Each slim, large-print Goosebumps release predictably surges to the top of the bestseller lists, outselling the John Grishams and Anne Rices of the moment. On a given week this summer, Stine had as many as seven of the nation’s 50 top-selling books, and as many as 15 of the top 150. At this rate, it’s no wonder he has 90 million books in print.

And no wonder the 52-year-old author has transformed the world of publishing. The children’s department in any bookstore tells the story. Under the broad “young adult” banner, scattered copies of Kidnapped, The Yearling, or White Fang may suggest familiar territory, but the section is otherwise unrecognizable, dominated by shelf upon tightly packed shelf of horror books, their covers reminiscent of the lurid slasher-movie posters of the late 1970s to mid 1980s — novels, trilogies, and series without end. The popularity of Stine has inspired a host of competitors and imitators — Diane Hoh (of the Nightmare Hall series), Richie Tankersley Cusick and Nicholas Pine (Terror Academy) among them. It has also propelled a onceseedy sideline of children’s publishing into the market’s mainstream.

This phenomenon is more than a matter of bringing new tricks to old pulp. From the boundless word-processing capacities of Stine and Co. comes a new genre: shock fiction for the young. In this literary landscape, narrative exists solely to support a series of shocks occurring at absurdly frequent intervals. Push-button characters serve as disposable inserts to advance the narrative, shock to shock.

For example, three pages after “Corky let out a horrified wail when she saw the bright red gush of blood spurting up from Rochelle’s neck,” we find that ” Bobbi had been trapped in the shower room. Somehow, the doors had shut and she’d been locked inside. Then scalding hot water shot out of the showers. Unable to escape, Bobbi had suffocated in the boiling steam. Murdered. Murdered by the evil.”

In this particular Stine, a Fear Street Super Chiller titled Cheerleaders: The New Evil (not to be confused with The First Evil, The Second Evil, and The Third Evil), shocks abound at intervals of no more than 12 pages, as lithe, teenage girls are incapacitated, variously, by confetti-cannon backfire, immolation, drowning, a bus crash, and, most memorably, a backflipping fit requiring hospitalization (“Lena tossed her head back — her eyes rolling around frantically — and uttered scream after scream”). The convulsing coed is barely strapped to a gurney when Stine comes through with this (incidentally, far from climactic) bit of carnage:

The Tigers coach lay with his arms stretched out. The neck of an enormous green water bottle from a cooler had been shoved into his mouth. The huge bottle rested on his face. Empty. The water had all drained out into his body, Corky saw. The coach had drowned. His belly and chest were bloated. Like a big water balloon. What have we done? Corky thought, turning her head away.

Good question. Shock fiction launches a beginning reader, pinball style, into a vapid quest for actual physical gratification, a bodily experience of accelerated pulse rates and queasy stomachs. The desired effect is something scientists call the “fight-or-flight” response, in which hormones surge and the blood pressure rises as a stress-induced panic takes over the autonomic nervous system.

The sensation, of course, can be strangely pleasurable. As one 10-year-old girl, a veteran of 40 Stine titles, put it to a Canadian newspaper, “I like how the creepy feelings and shivers go through your body.” And so, reading becomes a crude tool of physical stimulation, wholly devoid of mental, emotional, or spiritual engagement.

Does that sound like a working definition of pornography? This certainly is a disquieting thought. But after immersing myself in this murky genre (30 books in all), I could not help but perceive an unmistakably pornographic pattern of means and ends. As graphic, horrific, and exciting as Edgar Allan Poe’s stories may be, for example, the act of reading them requires a mental engagement with language, with character, with the author’s interpretation of events that transforms the action and elevates it above the cheap thrills of a rap sheet. But in shock fiction, a raw catalogue of horrors and grotesqueries is used — not interpreted, not stylized, not in any way transformed by a writer for good or bad — to charge the nerve endings of young readers. In less than deathless (indeed, less than grammatical) prose, shock writers deliver fix after blunt fix to shock (in other words, satisfy) their audience.

It doesn’t always take much; after all, a lot of blood goes a long way, as in this excerpt from Broken Hearts from the series Fear Street Super Chiller:

He stared at the bloody wound in her side. Stared at the puddle of blood at his feet.

Erica.

The girl was Erica.

He huddled over Erica, staring at the stab wound.

The blood red swirls floated angrily in Dave’s eyes. Blinding him.

Suffocating him.

So much blood.

Poor Erica.

Such a big, red wound. And so much blood.

Puddles and pools.

Such an angry, angry red . . .

Of course, shock readers can’t live by blood alone, even puddles and pools of it. Subsequent Stine narratives combine hot tar, boiling grease, and chunky vomit to great effect. Note that Stine refrains from sexual stimulation. Not only that but, as Stine has told the New York Times, “I don’t do drugs. I don’t do child abuse. I don’t really ever do divorce.” Stine says he prefers to traffc in what he calls “safe scares.” This is true enough of his books for younger readers, with their false alarms and improbable monsters. As for his fare for older readers, maybe jealous teens with homicidal tendencies, supernaturally-stalked babysitters, and spirit- murdered younger brothers are, by some strange measure, safer, more wholesome subject matter than child abuse. Then again, so what? (Thankfully, no shock fiction writer is, as yet, telling tales of child abuse.) If Stine’s pledge of restraint would seem to lift him a cut above his smuttier and more lurid competitors, such as Christopher Pike and Eric Weiner, the distinction is ultimately academic. Whether sexual, deviant, or just plain violent, the aim of all shock fiction is the same: to set off a bodily response which debases the act of reading — and, more important, the reader himself.

Most parents (who are, after all, the financial power behind the phenomenon) react with a myopic joy that their children are reading anything at all. ” I’m thrilled,” 11-year-old Bill’s mother told the now-defunct New York Newsday. “He’s literally reading a book a day. He always says, ‘Just a few more pages,’ when it’s time to go to bed. He devours [them].”

Other mothers, perplexed by the repellent nature of the books, go along with them anyway. “They just weren’t my choice of subject matter,” 9-year-old Tommy’s mother told the same Newsday reporter. “But I’m happy he’s reading. If he wasn’t reading this, he wouldn’t be reading anything at all. Now he’s at the point where he’s constantly reading. He’s fixated on horror.”

Poor ladies. There they are, clinging to the hope that their children’s enthusiasm for Stine will spread to, say, Henry James and his foray into horror fiction, The Turn of the Screw. Not likely. Even where such non- literate pursuits as baseball card statistics and comic books may lead to more literary endeavors shock fiction would seem to be a retarding, pre- literate experience. Will Bill and Tommy’s demands for sensational incident bar them from the great literary voyages of growth and discovery? Will they graduate from shock schlock to the best that’s been thought and said? Are you kidding? It’s doubtful that they will be able to go cover-to-cover with Dick Francis.

The Stine craze has its roots in 1986, when the erstwhile editor and humor writer at Scholastic Books (which now publishes Goosebumps) took a tip from a former colleague and produced his first work of shock fiction, The Blind Date. His initial, if unexpected, success led to the 1989 launch of Fear Street, the seminal shock series for 9-year-olds-and-up about the gruesome things that befall Fear Street’s hapless residents. Five more Stine lines have followed onto Simon and Schuster’s Archway Books list, all set in the town of Shadyside, through which the eponymous Fear Street runs. Including a smattering of uncollected shock novels, the Stine oeuvre now edges close to 60 books. And that doesn’t include the 35 slim installments of Goosebumps.

Where Fear Street brought Stine to an already viable youth horror market, the 1992 debut of Goosebumps marked the first time a writer had ventured to define such literary deviancy down to the level of 8-year-olds — persons still considered, so they say, to be of a tender age. Granted, in Goosebumps Stine truncates the voluminous detaile of the Fear Street books, and the body count is actually negligible. Of the two deaths I came across in my Stine sampling, one occurs in Say Cheese and Die (#4 in the series), in which an evil scientist dies of fright after his picture is taken with an equally evil camera. Here’s the description: “Eyes bulged out, the mouth in a twisted O of terror, the face stared up at them. Frozen.Dead.”

To meet the thrill-per-chapter quota in Goosebumps, Stine tends to ring false alarms, early and often: Someone plays dead at the end of one chapter, for example, only to rise again in the next. Hysterics are common, if often unwarranted. A character will strike a pose of terror at what a turn of the page reveals to be . . . nothing, which may be uproarious to youngsters still tickled by knock-knock jokes. One of Stine’s more effective tricks is the dream sequence, featuring some of the most menacing Goosebumps passages, as in the following excerpt from The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight (# 20):

“Grandpa — please — no!” I shrieked as he lowered his straw arms toward me.

He bared his teeth like an angry dog and let out a sharp, frightening growl.

The straw hands reached down for me.

Grandpa Kurt’s face was the same. The face I had always known. Except that his eyes were so cold, so cold and dead. . . .

His cold eyes narrowed in fury as he reached for me again.

“Noooo!”

Wonder what happens? Let’s just say Grandma Miriam is no bargain either. By the following chapter, the little dreamer has awakened, having successfully boosted the pulses of wee readers. In this way, Goosebumps is able to produce the same result as Fear Street: reading as a glandular activity.

No wonder 12-year-old Lucy Dark, heroine of The Girl Who Cried Monster (#8), can’t get through Huckleberry Finn. “I thought I’d read some of the scary mystery novels that all my friends are reading,” she laments. “But no way. Mr. Mortman insists on everyone reading ‘classics.’ He means old books.” When asked what she liked best about the book, she answers: “the description.” (This is a joke.) Although Frankenstein is more to her liking, she can’t finish it either: “I kind of expected more action,” she says.

More is on the way, as shocks-for-tots teeters on the brink of a boom beyond Stine. A slew of copycat series will debut this fall, among them Spooksville by Christopher Pike. (Pike actually begat the genre in its new form, and must have watched in some horror as his star was eclipsed.) In the meantime, Stine’s brand-name fame has already launched a companion series to Goosebumps, called R.L. Stine’s Ghosts of Fear Street. (Stine is now such an institution that he isn’t actually writing these books at all.) Noticeably more horrifying than Goosebumps, particularly the more recent numbers, this baby Fear Street competes by — what else? — intensifying the horror experience.

The result is anything but the growth and personal discovery of the young reader, which have ever been the markers of the best young adult fare, whether they be stories of horror, adventure, or romance. To be fair, Stine makes no claim to such greatness — or even goodness, for that matter. But because his brand of literary junk food has become a bookshelf staple to millions of young readers, some comparison with the books of the past is inevitable, not in terms of art or craft (which would be unfair) but rather in terms of theme and purpose.

In works ranging from Grimm’s Fairy Tales to Huckleberry Finn to Booth Tarkington’s seminal coming-of-age novel Seventeen, childhood and adolescence have been seen as a journey, a passage to adulthood. Moments of truth, phases of growth, discoveries of a wider world all transform the characters and enrich the readers, young and, in the best works, old. Not so in shock fiction, where there is no journey, and there certainly is no adulthood. Instead, immature characters flail in a stultifying realm of perpetual adolescence where hormonally fraught concerns exist forever out of context. Boyfriends frustrate girlfriends, brothers are unpleasant to their sisters, parents are props, voices scream, blood flows. And nothing ever changes. That is perhaps the biggest and saddest change of all. Ironically, as shock fiction has come to dominate the young adult genre, it has neutered it.

But, hey; relax. Kids need some beach junk of no value to read, don’t they? Emphatically, no, childern need no such thing. There are too many treasured books out there — deep and satisfying entertainments, from The Wind in the Willows to Charlotte’s Web, from The Call of the Wild to Ramona to The Once and Future King, whose enduring value and appeal are unquestionable for the simple fact that they do endure. Instead, Stine’s audience is being encouraged at a critical age to engage in literary pursuits devoid of content, crammed with shock.

Ours is, after all, a shock culture, all sensation and no feeling. A numbness paralyzes the arts, high and low, pretentious and proletarian, from the work of the supplicating grantees of government largesse to that of the plutocrats of rock and rap. Is it any surprise to see this trend reflected in children’s books? Just as crimes against children still wound a numbed populace, so too should shock fiction, for its role in desensitizing the very young, stunting the life of the mind before it has even begun.

A cruel turn of the screw, indeed.

Diana West’s fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.