Reader Beware!

It's spooky season again, and this time I wanted to talk about something related to this creepy time of year. I also wanted to tie it into last week's post about Choose Your Own Adventure and that specific tiny period of time where kids were encouraged to pick up books and read. Before the scolds fully assumed control, things were quite different in a lot of ways. What better way to start Halloween off than with the last real trend in reading (You can count Harry Potter, but that one goes beyond books) which got children to pick up books and became readers. That last trend would be R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series.

You might not know about it if you weren't a preteen at any point in the 1990s, but if you were then you remember just how big Goosebumps was. It's still one of the highest selling book series of all time, even now. That's not a record liable to be beat anytime soon.

Running from July 1992 to December 1997 (There's that year again...), Goosebumps was a series of short horror novellas written for kids. Every volume would contain a brand new story, cast of characters, and style of horror tale. Each book was different so there was something for anyone who wanted to read a fun horror yarn.

Considering this was more or less the golden age of toys and entertainment for children, it only made sense that the series would expand outside of books. The series was soon made into a TV show not unlike Are You Afraid of the Dark? and other such kid fare from the era. The series would go on to sell over 400 million copies worldwide, being one of the biggest literary successes of the 20th century. For a long time Goosebumps was simply inescapable.

How did R. L. Stine manage all this? Surely something like this seems foreign to us now. Books just don't become phenomenons anymore. How did he do it? The same way Choose Your Own Adventure did. Keep it simple and straightforward. Short, punchy tales that offer pure entertainment to the reader was the key.

Yes, pulp horror is what led to Goosebumps' success.

Books in the series were about everything from creepy living dolls to werewolves to house hauntings and everything in between. What Stine would do would be to take a good, their younger sibling, and a friend, and throw them up against a monster, a creepy situation, or just plain oddness, and have them attempt to figure a way out of the conflict. It was a basic formula, but a perfect one.

Unlike a series such as Are You Afraid of the Dark? which was more straightforward and traditional horror for the younger set, Goosebumps was more '90s-edged with some tongue in cheek humor and more twist endings than you can shake a Shyamalan at. There was subversion at play, but of the good kind. He wanted kids to remember that these were just stories, and he did by making his stories as weird as possible. Check out the ending of Welcome to Camp Nightmare for prof of that. They didn't always work, but they did give his stories a flavor of their own.

Either way, Goosebumps struck a chord with younger audiences and caused a mini-boom in reading even at my own elementary school. Just about everyone read it, even those who didn't like reading. It's hard to understand this now when there hasn't been an actual literary phenomenon in near two decades, but Goosebumps was a household name, and it was everywhere. I knew teachers and adults who detested it, but even they would have to admit that it did get kids reading and, if anything, they were a success for that alone.

Getting children to read used to be an important goal, but it just hasn't been one in the west for a long time now. Back in the 1990s? It was still a priority.

The series originally started as a trio of books released in the summer of 1992 that just did okay. It took some time for them to build steam from word of mouth, which they eventually did. Positive reception and buzz continued and eventually the series moved to being released in a bimonthly schedule. They were flying off the shelves. The original series would have 62 installments in total before the beginning moments of declining sales brought it to an end in December of 1997.

Scholastic attempted a relaunch not long later in January of 1998 called Goosebumps 2000 (because that was very popular nomenclature at the time) which was marketed as being more intense and (relatively) serious, but sales only went down. Probably because no one wanted a relaunch. By the beginning of 2000 they were down to 200,000 from 4 million, either of which OldPub would certainly be begging for now, but the relaunch series never had the same appeal as the original. Stine and Scholastic had already been getting in contract disputes since about 1996 and that rising conflict ended Goosebumps entirely in early 2000, thereby allowing the series to fade out of public consciousness as a relic of the 1990s.

None of this really explains why Goosebumps caught on, though. Sure it's easy to say that Stine "gave the audience what they wanted" and leave it at that, but what was it they wanted? Were it that easy than OldPub would still be creating hits, wouldn't they?

Much of this goes back to how badly schools misunderstand children, which has more or less always been a problem since those who choose to get into high positions in the school system only do so to whip their prisoners into shape. They want to mold kids in their image, not teach them, and they have never--and will never--understand at least one whole of the two sexes. Rowdy boys are tough to control, so they are just punished for being rowdy and ignored. Naturally this means they books they are assigned school are given purely to wash their thoughts clean, and little else. None of this ever sticks, however. I've never met anyone who remembers anything were assigned to read in school in a positive light. I meet even fewer who still read at all.

Children want escapism, this is why they are always playing games, make believe, or holding contests. They want something more than the drab day to day of their "punching the clock" equivalent. They want to be reminded that there is something bigger and better out there. Much like adults crave wonder and action, so do children. No one ever grows out of it, though there are many systems in modern society meant to stamp it out.

The school system doesn't know this, and if they do they don't care, and OldPub is either also oblivious to it or they actively choose to not give their customers what they want. Either way, this is why they both fail at what they are supposed to do, and will continue to fail until they finally collapse. Utopia isn't coming, and they will never create it.

Mr. Stine, however, appeared to know all this. He understood what kids actually wanted in their stories. A big element of his success is that he doesn't use his books to preach or moralize.

He's already smarter than your typical modern OldPub genre writer or editor, just based on that one statement. Who Knew that you didn't have to shove half-thought out propaganda in order to give people what they wanted? R. L. Stine. That's who. Oh, and his resulting series is one of the highest selling of all time. Funny how that works.

Reading is entertainment, at the end of the day. You can learn a lot from books, but teaching is what non-fiction is for. Heck, that's what documentaries and educational video games are for. Fiction, creative storytelling, and imagination, is meant for exercising wonder. It's a whole different thing that many refuse to understand, but fiction doesn't exist to teach--it exists to uplift. Sure, you can have morals to your story, they're more or less unavoidable in anything you do, but they aren't the main point of a piece of fiction. The adventure is the point. Even Charles Dickens entertained his readers with his serialized stores, modern writers have no excuse.

Though one of the other big issues with the current OldPub industry is in its odd dismissal of an entire sex. They deliberately cut out half their potential audience. As mentioned above, boys don't read, but no one ever tried to assess the problem or figure out a solution to why that is.

And yet Mr. Stine did it. He managed to enthrall an entire demographic that OldPub has never tried to court since the success of Goosebumps even near two decades since the series first landed on the racks. That's right, the books were a hit with boys.

You can tell OldPub took this success seriously by all the attempts they've made to reach that audience again since. Sarcasm aside, this is a telling sign that these companies are either run by people who don't care, or people who deliberately make bad decisions. Both are possible. But to not even attempt to replicate the success of Goosebumps shows enormous ineptitude. They are called OldPub for a reason, folks. They couldn't even figure out how it got popular to begin with.

In fact, from what I can muster, it looks as if, opposite to Choose Your Own Adventure, that Goosebumps' success was more or less entirely by word of mouth on the playground. Librarians wouldn't push it because the series didn't teach morals, teachers found them vacuous and trashy, and Scholastic just treated Goosebumps as if it was an obligation to put it out. I'm sure if you were alive at the time and if you were thinking back on it now you probably couldn't remember any such marketing blitz campaign for the series. They were just popular and other kids were reading them. It's odd, but that's what a lot of successful properties of the 1990s felt like. Word of mouth carried more than advertising dollars did.

While Goosebumps took a little while to take off, it did get a boost from the fact that it had a television show by 1995 that lasted 4 seasons until 1998 (...) and was a major success from the get go. I'd wager a guess that if you were around at the time and had read a book or two that you also stuck around to watch some of the series. Running on Fox Kids, it was one of the most popular series on it and did well even in reruns. Peggy Charren must have been fuming.

You might think the television show was a good bit of promotion for the book by Scholastic, but you'd be wrong. It was the producers that came to them to create the series. The publisher saw the dollar signs and they took it, but they certainly didn't go out of their way to get it made. Some of the same people involved with Are You Afraid of the Dark? were even involved in it, including casting and filming even being done in Canada, for the most part.  Here is an oral history of the Goosebumps TV show, should that interest you. It has an interesting bit of history, too.

It was around that time that Stine's production company and Scholastic began to have legal battles and much back and forth. By the beginning of 2000, Stine's contract had run out and the two parted ways, Goosebumps fading out with him. Scholastic threw away an entire cash cow for nothing, really. Stine did eventually return eight years later to continue the series, but the gap in time certainly didn't help anything. That lost time is never going to be made up.

The 1990s were a strange time, particularly the first half. While the Greatest Generation were handing the reins over to the Baby Boomers to run everything (into the ground, it turned out), this was the last period where entertainment for the sake of entertainment was allowed to flourish. At least, in the first half of the decade while the baton was still being passed. Goosebumps is one of these things that got under the wire just in time. It blew up just before the wall was put up. This was in the same brief time period where Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and Image Comics struck gold by offering big entertainment for the younger set. It's no coincidence that none of these things managed to carry their full popularity into the ensuing decade. They couldn't, not in the changing climate.

But while that era ended by the late '90s, so too is the current era. OldPub and Hollywood are both on their last legs with nothing much left to carry them forward. That era of weird and wild entertainment is coming back, but in a much different form.

I'm sure I do't need to tell you that this is what NewPub is going to do.

This is the spooky season where we remind ourselves of the ultimate powerlessness of the gruesome and ghoulish, and where we prepare for the glorious season of hope ahead. There's no point dwelling on what was already done, but instead looking forward to what is coming, because what is coming is going to be better than anything you can imagine.

Halloween is here, so lets have ourselves a good time and remember what's coming next. Readers beware! You're in for a good time.

Learn just what NewPub is in the Pulp Mindset!