GoosebumpsAuthor R.L. Stine Admits He Was 'Scared of Everything' Growing Up, Plus 19 More Facts About His Spooky Series

Mar. 15, 2025

R.L. Stine and some of his ‘Goosebumps’ characters.Photo:Family Channel/YouTube; Slaven Vlasic/Getty; Netflix

Family Channel/YouTube; Slaven Vlasic/Getty; Netflix

WithGoosebumps,R.L. Stinegave a generation of kids a love of reading — and nightmares that conceivably lasted for years. The famously prolific author turned haunted masks, demonic dummies and supernatural cameras into terrifying cultural touchstones. Since its debut in 1992, the beloved series has sold more than 400 million books worldwide in 35 languages, securing its place as the second-best-selling literary franchise in history.

“What’s most satisfying to me is the millions of kids who learned to read from Goosebumps and who learned to really enjoy reading,“he toldTodayin 2022. “Now on Twitter and everywhere I hear people saying, ‘I wouldn’t be a librarian today if it wasn’t for your books.’ It’s so gratifying. [I hear things like] ‘I wouldn’t be a writer today. I just had my first book published thanks to you’ or ‘Thanks for getting me through a difficult childhood.’ That’s the most satisfying thing. You never get tired of hearing that.”

In honor of spooky season (let’s be real, we get a few more weeks!), read on to learn more about this beloved book series that caused an untold number of nightmares.

1. R. L. Stine originally wanted to be funny rather than scary, and ran humor magazines for decades.

Despite his reputation for frightening multiple generations of children, Stine insists that wasn’t his goal when he first set out to become a writer. “I never planned to be scary, I always just wanted to be funny,“he told the Huffington Post in 2015. “And I’d be typing up these funny stories, but I don’t know why. And my mother would be outside my door, and she’d say, ‘What’s wrong with you? Go outside and play!’ ”

Desperate for an audience, Stine would distribute these self-penned joke magazines — upwards of 100 of them,he would claim toGQ— around school, until his teachers got wind of it and demanded he stop.

R.L. Stine in 2015.Slaven Vlasic/Getty

Slaven Vlasic/Getty

As the editor of the magazine, he was entitled to 22 percent of its profits, which he ultimately used to finance his move to New York City upon graduation in 1965. “I thought, at the time, if you wanted to be a writer, you had to live in New York,” he added. “You had no choice.”

2. Stine wrote fake interviews with The Beatles for an early writing gig, before working at a BDSM magazine.

The Beatles in New York City.Getty Images

Getty Images

Before runningBananas, Stine’s first job as a writer in the Big Apple was making up interviews for a woman who ran six movie magazines out of a brownstone on 96th St. “I never saw her dressed,” he toldThe Verge.“She was always in this brown bathrobe. She never went to the movies or anything. She just did these magazines. I would come in, in the morning, and she’d say, ‘Do an interview with Diana Ross.’ So I’d sit down — type, type, type, type, type — and I’d write an interview with Diana Ross. And she’d say, ‘Do an interview with The Beatles.’ Fine — type, type, type — and we made it all up. It was a great job … And I had to write three or four of them a day, so it taught me to write really fast. It didn’t last very long.”

After that, Stine endured what he called “the worst year of my life” as an editor at a trade magazine for the soft drink industry. “I would write about new syrups and flip-top cans, and there was a big debate back then over whether soda could come in plastic bottles,” he continued toThe Verge. “I had to cover bottlers’ conventions.” For this, he was paid the not-so-princely sum of $140 a week.

In a 2014AV Club interview, Stine detailed the worst job he ever had: Writing for a dubious men’s publication. “I think it was a sex-and-sadism kind of magazine because they would give me all kinds of photographs, and they were always photographs of women all tied up,” he recalled. “They were very vile photographs and I would write short stories to go with the photographs … I was kind of ashamed and I wasn’t really proud of what I was writing, so I wouldn’t sign my name, I’d sign the name of my high school principal instead.”

By the end of the ‘60s, Stine went to work for Scholastic after answering an ad in theNew York Times. Employed in the Scholastic Junior department, he began writing history and geography articles and news stories, and eventually running his own magazine,Search. “It was a history-current affairs magazine for junior high kids, but written at a fifth-grade level,“he told Mental Floss in 2015. “That’s how I learned about reading levels. I learned all the vocabulary lists for fourth and fifth grade, and that’s how I keepGoosebumpseasy to read.”

3. Stine created the beloved Nickelodeon kids showEureeka’s Castle.

Stine owes his big break in horror to another, unnamed horror writer. “I was having lunch with Jean Feiwel, the editorial director at Scholastic at the time,” he told Mental Floss. “She’d just had a fight with a YA horror writer and said, ‘I’m never working with him again. You could write a good teen horror novel. How about it?’ I hadn’t read any teen horror novels, but I didn’t say no to anything in those days. I ran to the bookstore and bought a bunch of horror books.”

Fear Streetproved to be an enormous success. As of 2010, more than 80 million books from the series have been sold, and that number has grown significantly with the 2021 Netflix trilogy of the same name.

Stine was more than happy in his YA lane when his wife, Jane, and her business partner convinced him to skew a little younger.  “My editors, my wife and her partner, said, ‘No one’s ever done a series for 7- to 11-year-olds, scary books. We have to try it.’ And I didn’t want to do it,”he toldTodayin 2022. “That’s the kind of businessman I am.”

The initial contract for the fledglingGoosebumpsseries was for four books, with a new one released every two months. Sales were slow at first. “They just sat around,”Stine toldThe Boston Globein 2015. “There was no advertising or hype. I didn’t do any appearances. This was all before social media, so it was kids discovering the books and kids telling kids. It was entirely the secret kids network. The second contract was for eight more books, and then it took off.”

7. The books faced bans from many schools, and ranked higher than Madonna and Howard Stern on the American Library Association’s challenged books list.

Howard Stern with his book ‘Private Parts’ in 1993.SGranitz/WireImage

SGranitz/WireImage

The firstGoosebumpsbook,Welcome to Dead House, was published in July 1992, and within two years the series was selling more than 4 million books a month. “In ‘93, ‘94, ’95 — the height ofGoosebumps— theUSA TodayTop 50 Books list was usually 20 to 25 Goosebumps books,” Stine toldThe Verge.

That said, Stine “thought there would be a lot more protests than there were,” he recalled toThe Hollywood Reporter. “I thought people would be very reluctant, but partly because the covers were so much more garish and scary than the stories … A lot of parents were upset. They were trying to getGoosebumpsout of school libraries. That happened quite a bit in the early days before people really knew what it was. But a lot less than I thought.”

8. ManyGoosebumpsbooks have their origins in ‘50s horror movies andThe Twilight Zone.

Stine drew inspiration for his terrifying tales from the media of his youth, including the groundbreakingTales From the Cryptcomic book series, as wellThe Twilight Zone — later calling writer-host Rod Serling “a hero of mine.” (A slightly less-obvious influence was British author P.G. Wodehouse, who penned theJeeves and Woosterseries, chronicling the misadventures of an airheaded aristocrat and his loyal valet.)

“A lot of theGoosebumpstitles are from these ’50s horror movies my brother and I saw every week,” Stine admitted to the Huffington Post. “It Came from Beneath the Seabecame aGoosebumpsbook calledIt Came from Beneath the Sink. That kind of thing.” He’s also cited the 1945 movieDead of Night, about a ventriloquist who has a dummy that comes to life, as being particularly formative on his signature character Slappy. So was a chapter in the originalPinocchioin which the newly sentient puppet falls asleep with his feet on the stove and burns them off.

9. SomeGoosebumpsplots were borrowed from Stine’s family life.

Not all of Stine’s plots have their roots in classic cinema. Other entries in theGoosebumpscanon were drawn from moments he experienced with his family. Case in point?The Haunted Mask, in which a Halloween mask begins to take over a young girl’s personality. Stine was inspired to write the story after witnessing his young sonstruggle to remove a Frankenstein maskafter trick-or-treating. He also incorporated a memory from his own childhood, when he asked his parents to buy him a scary Halloween costume — and they came home witha duck outfit.(It would go on to becomeone of the most famous books in the series, and a personal favorite of Stine’s.)

10. Stine worked ridiculously fast when it came to writingGoosebumpsbooks.

Stine’s productivity is legendary. At one point he was writing aGoosebumpsand aFear Streetnovel each month. As he toldThe Village Voice, “I never went out for lunch. I would do 20 pages a day.” By his estimation it took about three or four days to sketch out an outline for a new book — or up to two weeks, for a particularly tricky story. In that outline, he told Scholastic, “I [create] a cheat sheet of every character in the book — I write down the character name and a few characteristics and that really helps me.”

By his own admission, many writers take the opposite approach. “Most authors have an idea for a book, they write, they’re writing, later on they think of a title,”Stine told the Huffington Post. “I have to start with a title. It leads me to the story. Kids always ask — everyone asks — ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ I wanna say, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Because we all get ideas. Mine actually come from thinking of the title first.”

11. Stine’s rules forGoosebumpsbooks? Keep it fantastical, keep the blood green, and stay away from New York City!

Stine has a number of guiding rules for the book series. For one, he told the Huffington Post he’ll never set a book in New York City, as the suburbs are more relatable. “It’s a superstition,” Stine said. “I’ve never done it. A lot of kids don’t know New York. They know a nice suburban backyard, but they don’t know New York City. It’s kind of elite in some ways, I think. I think it would make the stories more obscure for kids.”

Secondly, forGoosebumps, he said, “I have to make the kids know that what’s happening in the book couldn’t really happen. That it’s just a fantasy. And then when I write aFear Streetbook or an adult book, I have to make people think it could happen. It’s kind of the opposite.”

R.L. Stine in 2012.Slaven Vlasic/Getty

12. The MVP of theGoosebumpsseries is Stine’s editor — and wife! — Jane.

Also crucial to Stine’s process: his wife Jane Waldhorn, who’s been a collaborator since early in his professional life. “I’d been in New York for two years when I met her, at a party in Brooklyn that I didn’t want to go to,”he recalled toThe Village Voice. “It was raining and I thought, ‘How am I gonna get back from Brooklyn?’ When we got married, I was 25 and Jane was 22 years old. I don’t know what the hell she was doing.”

ToThe Verge, he explained, “We were both at Scholastic for many years. She was actually my boss for four years there. That was not great. I got lousy raises. She’d be embarrassed to give me a really good raise since we were married. So I got very bad raises.”

He still remembers getting one outline back from her with some notes. “Up at the top were two words. It said, ‘Psychotic ramblings.’ That was it. Psychotic ramblings.”

13. Stine’s young son set up a lucrative side-business thanks to the success ofGoosebumps.

Just as Stine kept busy distributing his self-penned joke books at school as a kid, his young son Matthew also had a side hustle going with his classmates. Amusingly, it was based on his father’s bestsellers.

“I think my son used to sell parts inGoosebumpsfor $10,” Stine told the AV Club. “He would come home and say, ‘Dad, you have to put James in the next one,’ or, ‘Dad, you have to put Will in.’ And of course I always did it.”

14. Stine made sure to answer every fan letter personally.

WhenStine wasn’t busy writingGoosebumpsorFear Streetbooks, he was busy responding to letters from his young fans. “It’s time consuming and hard to write a letter,” he explained toThe Verge. “That’s hard for kids, so they deserve an answer. Every kid gets an answer.”

His favorite was one kid who wrote hima letter reading, simply, “Dear, R.L. Stine, I’ve read 40 of your books and I think they’re really boring.”

Tim Burton in 2023.Julien Hekimian/Getty Images

Julien Hekimian/Getty Images

AGoosebumpstelevision series premiered on Fox in 1995 and lasted for three years, but a proposed big-screen project in that same period sadly never materialized.

“We had a movie deal to do aGoosebumpsmovie … like at the height ofGoosebumps, back in ‘94, ‘95, around there,” Stine told CinemaBlend in 2018. “We actually had a deal with Fox to do a movie, and Tim Burton who was going to be the producer. We had a big meeting, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’ll be great. Tim Burton andGoosebumps. It’ll be great.’ We had a nice meeting with him, and we had a great time and we talked about what we should do, and then nothing happened.”

Stine would claim that Burton “got involved in some Superman project that also never happened” — likelySuperman Lives,a feature reboot for the Man Of Steel that was going to star Nicolas Cage as the titular hero, which got as far asscreen tests with Cage in costumebefore dying on the vine.

16. Stine had a funny cameo in the 2015Goosebumpsmovie adaptation, but it was a massive pain to shoot.

Goosebumpsfinally came to the big screen in 2015, with Jack Black playing a fictionalized version of Stine. In an amusing twist, the real-life Stine was asked to make a cameo, saying a quick “hi” to his movie self. (Appropriately, his character is named “Mr. Black.”) Unfortunately, the scene proved unexpectedly grueling for the author.

17. Stine met fellow literary horror god Stephen King — and King had some playful criticism.

Stephen King in the 1970s.Alex Gotfryd/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty

Alex Gotfryd/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty

The meeting was friendly enough, but King apparently had some constructive (and probably playful) notes for Stine. “He [jokingly] accused me of using every amusement park theme any writer could ever use,”Stine continued to EW in 2015. “He accused me of using them all up, and he’s probably right. [Laughs] I know I’ve done every Halloween story you could possibly do.”

18. Even Stine isn’t a fan of all his books.

Stine probably appreciated King’s candor, as even he doesn’tloveevery entry in theGoosebumpsseries.

“There’s some bad ones,” he admitted toThe Hollywood Reporter. “Not all can be great. I looked atGo Eat Worms!recently and I was like, ‘That’s a horrible book.’ It’s just not good at all. There was another one that had a great evil dog on the cover calledThe Barking Ghost. That’s a horrible book.”

19. Stine wrote all those books with just one finger. (Or so he claims …)

In an interview withThe Strandmagazine, Stine said he’s never learned how to type properly.  “I’m totally left-handed, and I just started typing with my pointer finger, nothing else, just one finger, not even two. And I’ve now written 300 books on this finger … My typing finger is totally bent, totally curved, from all these books.” Stine has repeated the anecdote many times over the years, including at a 2013 live event at The Bell House in Brooklyn. “Look,” he said, displaying the disfigured digit proudly, “It’s ruined. Totally bent.”

20. Stine says he was a big scaredy cat growing up.

R.L. Stine.Dan Nelke

Dan Nelke

There’s a very high likelihood that Stine would not have read his own books as a young boy.

“I was scared of everything!“he toldThe Hollywood Reporterin 2022. “Seriously, I was a very fearful kid. I think this is one reason why early on I stayed in my room typing out stories. I was very shy and very fearful. I’d be riding my bike at night and when I was bringing it back I always thought someone was lurking in the garage. I always knew something was in there, so I’d toss my bike in and run into the house! It was not a good way to be a kid, Being fearful. But it helped me later on. I can remember that feeling of panic and use it.”

source: people.com