Date: Fri 25-Oct-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: KIMH

Illustration: C

Location: A11

Quick Words:

Stine-books-Goosebumps-

Full Text:

(children's scary readings for Halloween cover, 10/25/96)

For Younger Imaginations, Stories That Give You Goosebumps

BY KIM J. HARMON

Stay Out of the Basement... Night of the Living Dummy... The Werewolf of Fever

Swamp... The Cuckoo Clock of Doom... The Girl Who Cried Monster... Piano

Lessons Can Be Murder... It Came From Beneath the Sink...

It's fun to be scared.

Well, not really scared... just the type of scared you get while sitting

around a campfire on summer nights, making up stories like the Midnight

Society does on Nickelodeon's "Are You Afraid of the Dark?"

Stories about living sponges and monsters in the hallway, evil clocks and

hideous creature hiding in the basement - these are the stories author R.L.

Stine has written in the wickedly popular Goosebumpsî series from Parachute

Press and Scholastic, Inc.

Monster Blood... Welcome to Camp Nightmare... One Day at HorrorLand... The

Scarecrow Walks at Midnight... A Night in Terror Tower... The Horror at Camp

Jellyjam... A Shocker on Shock Street...

The Goosebumpsî stories are simple and fun, much less intense and less graphic

than the young adult novels R.L. Stine also writes. It is horror the way you

always thought horror would be when you were a kid - fun, but fiendish, a

little scary and always with some horrible creature like the Grool ( It Came

From Beneath the Sink ) running around creating mayhem.

... The Barking Ghost... The Headless Ghost... The Abominable Snowman of

Pasadena... How I Got My Shrunken Head... Egg Monsters from Mars... Welcome to

Dead House... Say Cheese and Die!...

This stuff isn't Dracula or Frankenstein or even The Shining . There is not a

lot of literature to be found between the covers of The Headless Ghost , but

the good thing about Goosebumpsî - besides being just plain fun (even for a

Dad like me, who reads this stuff to his kids) - is that it gets kids to read

and the stories are complex to the point where kids are not simply soaking in

the frights but actually anticipating and figuring things out...

"Hey, whoa! You might be right," he admitted. He pulled himself up to face me.

"I think it is alive! And I also think... it's mine!"

With that, he dove under the sink to grab the sponge.

"No way!" I protested. I grabbed the back of his T-shirt and hauled him out.

"I saw it first. The sponge belongs to me!"

He shook me off and dove back down again. "Finders, keepers!" he cried.

I made another grab for him.

But before I could touch him, Daniel uttered a bloodcurdling scream of pain!

-from Goosebumps #30,

It Came From Beneath The Sink

An offshoot of the regular Goosebumpsî books are the Reader Beware... You

Choose The Scare line where, like Escape from the Carnival of Horrors , Tick

Tock, You're Dead! and Night in Werewolf Woods , the reader actually gets to

twist the course of the story by making choices throughout the story,

influencing events and creating an ending that might be... well...

Deadly.

Goosebumpsî is cute, fun, and a little scary if things like evil ventriloquist

dummies give you the heebie-jeebies.