Hey, remember Goosebumps? I’ll assume you do; there’s enough Goosebumps-related nostalgia-bait on the Web to suggest that damn near everyone with an Internet connection has at least a vague recollection of Stay Out of the Basement or It Came from Beneath the Sink. Some of this nostalgia is dependent not on R. L. Stine’s original novellas but on the Fox Kids television program, the first of many adaptations including a Rupert Holmes play (!) and two feature films. But the books themselves—a franchise still soldiering on after thirty-four years and well over two hundred titles—have sold over four hundred million copies, more than any other series in history, save Harry Potter. Even a decade after their mid-nineties heyday, finding a Goosebumps on a public library shelf that hadn’t been already read to tatters was something of a feat, and perhaps this is still the case. But if so many of us obsessed over those books as kids, and if publishers know about it, how come there are so few comparable series aimed at grown-ups?
Among the most obvious differences between the landscape of horror literature and the landscape of horror cinema is the role of the series. Horror cinema is practically defined by its franchises—the one with Texas, the one with Elm Street, the three distinct series about white-masked killers. When it comes to macabre books for kids, there are numerous series; after Goosebumps became a runaway success, off-brands came out of the woodwork, often bearing similar fear-response titles like Shivers and Bone Chillers, and this phenomenon never died off completely. Before Stine created Goosebumps in 1992, he contributed to Scholastic’s Point Horror (more of a publishing imprint than a series, per se) and started Fear Street, two of several teen-oriented horror series to emerge in the 1980s. However, horror novels aimed at adults are almost always standalones.
To be precise, the books in the aforementioned series are mostly standalones in a narrative sense, grouped only by a logo and a “vibe”—like Twilight Zone episodes, or the relationship between the third Halloween movie and the rest of the films. Plenty of authors who write horror for adults are consistent enough, in tone and in subject matter, that a publisher could very well have slapped a collective title onto most or all of their works and called them a series. (Richard Laymon would have been a prime candidate for this, with his obsessively sleazy oeuvre.) But a grown-up’s horror novel or novella is almost always an island unto itself in terms of both story and marketing, with multibook sagas like Necroscope or Anno Dracula being the exception rather than the rule. This is a matter of genre expectations; contemporary fantasy, horror’s slightly cheerier sibling, is often expected to exist in the context of a saga, a sequence, a franchise. Often, so is the horror film; this was especially true in the 1980s, with its parade of Friday the 13ths serving as “the genre’s standard-bearer,” as James A. Janisse puts it. But the horror book is not.
I’m not suggesting that Shirley Jackson should have produced a Hill House: Origins or Hill House in Space, or taken the Leprechaun route and written a Hill House in the Hood. Instead, allow me to pivot as sharply as a Stine twist ending and point to the hideous menace that’s been lurking just out of frame all the time you’ve been reading this: the literacy crisis.
A large percentage of modern kids, especially in the United States, are reading fewer books, falling behind in academic reading levels, and growing into adults who don’t read at all—even adults who see it as a point of pride not to have cracked open a book since high school, and only then because they had to. This is especially prevalent among men, who make up only a fifth of the book-buying public. There’s no silver bullet that can solve this problem. But the discussion of Goosebumps offers a hint as to how a few nonreaders might be won over.
Time and again, when Goosebumps comes up in conversation, someone inevitably says that Goosebumps got them into reading. Frequently someone will bring up the Scholastic Book Fair and the vividly remembered scurrying to get a hold of the most recent installment. Stine’s writing is not solely responsible for the series’ huge success, and neither is media coverage—just look at the books. Specifically, the sixty-two of the original run. Many of us who weren’t yet born during the series’ heyday couldn’t help but be drawn to the books when we, as preadolescents in a different millennium, happened upon them at thrift stores, garage sales or libraries. When a kid first sees those enticingly colorful covers and their appropriately shivery art (usually by Tim Jacobus), they wonder with great excitement what frights might lurk within. And therefore, they practically need to open the book and read it.
This thought process, in its essence, is not at all exclusive to children. Horror has a certain magnetic pull on people. There’s no need to dump a statistic about ticket sales here; that you’re reading this article is proof enough. So is the fact that America’s most famous and beloved living author of adult fiction is most likely Stephen King. Furthermore, manga continues to enjoy a wide readership among those who have long avoided prose, and profoundly dark manga like Berserk and Chainsaw Man are among the most popular. Part of the appeal, certainly, is the question of what ghastly thing will happen next?
We, collectively, are hungry for horror. The anthology-style series format plays into this excellently, as do the pacing and brevity of a typical Goosebumps book—finish one thrill ride and another one’s waiting for you, and another and another and another, with different threats and different twists and turns. It’s a formula that keeps readers coming back, and having a formula is not a shameful thing. This is more or less the recipe for the multi-author Killer VHS series by Shortwave Publishing, quite possibly the closest thing yet produced to “Goosebumps books for grown-ups.” However, with the possible exception of its bestselling second installment (Candy Cain Kills by Brian McAuley), Killer VHS has yet to receive much attention, even within the horror-lit community. So, let’s talk about marketing.
The non-reading or minimally reading modern adult isn’t going to be strolling around bookstores looking at covers, or checking out scary-looking paperbacks at a swap meet. But they are, inevitably, on social media. And they are, inevitably, paying attention to what is being talked about on social media. Forget about BookTok, TikTok’s endlessly discordant Colleen Hoover fan club; BookTok, among other things, is far too insular. Think big. Though it may sound ambitious to the point of lunacy, if marketing a book or book series to the general public through social media was impossible, clownish influencer Kai Cenat would never have read the Internet-famous Atomic Habits during his livestreams. If you missed the fawning news coverage (responding with astonished reverence to the fact that this grown man is able to read), he did.
So if Goosebumps got a few million kids to read, where’s the horror franchise that will get grown-ups to do the same? If someone was to write a horror book series aimed at adults, and was able to very successfully market said series—in other words, make it a topic of conversation on the Web—it wouldn’t drive a stake through the heart of illiteracy, but it could contribute to turning the reading decline around. At the very least, it would be one more thing to point non-readers to when they complain about a supposed lack of interesting books for adults. In the words of Journey and who knows how many others, everybody wants a thrill. You remember Goosebumps for a reason.
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Jeremiah Towle’s writing has appeared in such venues as 34 Orchard, The Hard Times and The Sligo Journal. His first novel is forthcoming, although he cannot guess when exactly it’s coming forth.