The Curator: R.L. Stine is a gateway drug
growing up on Fear Street and horror as a new kind of girlhood, plus some new books and new adaptations
It’s 1997. I’m eleven years old. My prized possessions include a boom box, No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, the Delia*s catalog, and my book collection. For fun, I arrange the shelves of my Billy bookcase neatly by author and color. Mostly filled with mass-market paperbacks scored from Borders trips, I run out of space and have to double-row it, agonizing over decisions about what to display and what to hide.
What a life.
Perhaps because I still own the bookshelf, its dominance over my early reading memories is total. I do not exist without that shelf, without those books. I had the usual elder millennial suspects - Nancy Drew, The Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High, American Girl Dolls, and the ever-depressing Dear America series. I dabbled in the wacky stuff like Roald Dahl or Shel Silverstein but the darkest it ever got was a bald woman turning children into mice.
That is until everyone’s favorite fucked up uncle R.L. Stine gave me a taste of the good stuff and I was hooked.
It’s questionable how I got my hands on that first horror novel. I texted my mother, “I really don’t know! But I wasn’t very careful about it” i.e. why I love her hi mom! I know in my heart it was an R.L. Stine Fear Street book and after that first I mainlined everything I could get my unemployed hands on.
If you aren’t familiar, R.L. Stine is the author of 497 horror novels, almost exclusively for children and teens. That’s right 497. An ungodly amount but when the average page count is 150 pages it’s more reasonable. Fear Street, written from 1989 to 1995, was a horror fiction series featuring teens getting into all sorts of paranormal shenanigans, like evil cheerleaders returning from the dead or murdery gifts showing up at the bitchy girl’s house.
Unlike his most famous Goosebumps series, Fear Street was targeted at older girls with titles like Double Date, The Prom Queen, and my everlasting favorite the Cheerleaders trilogy. The stories are plot-driven and, even though they look terrifying, always have a happy ending. Characters who survive a book often appear in subsequent stories. R.L. Stine told CNN that he wrote an unhappy ending once and the kids revolted, proving exactly how much these books meant to readers1.
And I too was OBSESSED like only a teenage wannabe can. Googling these covers gave me a real 13 going on 30 moment.
Before Fear Street, all the books I’d been fed were about good girls. The Babysitters Club showed girls as responsible and hardworking. Sweet Valley High taught me how to seek boys’ attention and care about my looks. Nancy Drew always solved the crime and still came home to care for her father. The lessons were predictable, safe, sterile.
While I loved these books, none of them got me. A me that had experienced death early. A me that struggled with social stuff, that was anxious from the get. Reading the goody stuff felt like trying on a different person.
Reading Fear Street was a thrill to my little baby soul. A mirror into my psyche. A way to escape the things that plague an almost-teen girl. And it was better than experiencing the ride of life because almost everything new was scary. With books, there was no fear of falling off.
The books were scary, yes, but they were funny, interesting, and they said something new. The 100-book series storyline starts with an ancient curse haunting the fictional town of Shadyside. Two innocent women are accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake (isn’t that always how it starts??). After the first book The Betrayal, citizens of Shadyside suffer the consequences of these actions into eternity.
Shit that is dark! But what a departure from the good girls, the girls that fed right into Judeo-Christian values about obeying our parents, working hard, being a good American. The characters, especially the girls, were complicated - mean or bitchy, smart, brave, dead. They made me think there were other ways to be in the world except pretty. I mean dead cheerleaders??? What other conclusion is there to draw!
“Teen horror stories are actually empowering them against these horrific things in their life. To have their own stories and their own ways of fighting back, I think we give them a voice.” - Catherine Scully, Horror Writers Association
Was I ready for these kinds of stories? Who knows. I do think it’s incredibly important to expose kids to real life in safe ways. At eleven I had already experienced a lot. There was no hiding life from me. These books defined my childhood.
Part of it is also simple nostalgia. I know I have rose-colored lenses while writing this. But the joy of digging into a new paperback as a child is unmatched. You are untethered. From other people’s opinions, from the overwhelm of whatever else might be on your shelf, from what you are missing out on. I will forever chase the high of enjoying things with abandon, without self-consciousness.
The Fear Street series was my gateway drug, leading me to eventually seek out something even more dangerous, more sinister, more whispers of sex. Eventually, I got deep into Stephen King (like most of us) way too early. Carrie was my first hard drug, and that led to the hardest of them all, Bret Easton Ellis. I pushed my own limits a few times, just to see how it felt. And it all started with Uncle Stine.
But I turned out fine, right? Right?
Tell me, what books defined your childhood?
ASTROLOGICAL NEWS →
Monday, March 25th was the second of three lunar eclipses over a year span. The first was Saturday, October 14th, 2023. My favorite astrologer, Chani said to look back at that day for lessons. We said goodbye to Peanut on October 14th. On March 25th, two deaths in my extended network occurred, deeply affecting loved ones. Experiencing the grief of losing a pet made me more receptive to holding space for others’ grief. I am thankful for that. I hope you were kind to yourself this past week, and if not, there is still time.
READING →
Mystery novel The Engima of Room 622 by Joel Dicker is A FREAKING DELIGHT. I’m only 20% in and I think about it every moment that I am not reading it. After The Idiot, it has reminded me why I love reading.
Back on my audiobook bullshit after a brief hiatus. Trying to finish Karin Slaughter’s Kisscut so I can get to Katherine Arden’s new book The Warm Hands of Ghosts which is delightfully on Spotify.
Everyone who has read Percival Everett’s James says it’s a perfect book. A part of me does not know how to approach such a book. I will soon though.
WATCHING →
Last weekend, my husband and I saw Late Night with the Devil, a new film by Cameron and Colin Cairnes. I have no idea who they are but I will now see any film they decide to make. It was nostalgic and campy and retro and perfect.
NEW BOOKS →
include a pop-culture internet-obsessed dark existentialist comedy of errors, a true crime story about a woman searching for the two men who abducted and killed her mother, and a gothic family-vacation-gone-wrong supernatural thriller (!).
BOOK NEWS →
The world may have turned on JT, but Jessica Biel is still my TV princess. She’s set to star in an adaptation of my least favorite Karin Slaughter book The Good Daughter. Perhaps Biel will make the character a better or more interesting person to root for.
Harvard had to remove books from its collection that featured real human skin bindings. Gross.
J.K. Rowlings detective novels are slated for TV adaptation.
One of my most treasured authors Marisha Pessl announced a new book. I have lost my mind scheming to get an ARC.
Not book-related, but this article from The Cut on seven women who made dramatic career pivots gives hope to all of us aspiring writers (or at least for me, it does for me).
RESTACK OF THE WEEK →
This essay by
on The Virgin Suicides. A 10/10 example of a stellar book essay and everything I aspire to be.AND CATS →
The kids’ new favorite pastime is forcing me to sit in my towel after the shower and hang out. I’m not mad (just hairy).
In Case You Missed It 🖤
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See you around the bookshelf!
Natalie
R.L. Stine, a chat with the best-selling children’s author http://www.cnn.com/COMMUNITY/transcripts/stine.html
Stine's stock has increased significantly in the 21st century, since all of his kid and teen fans grew up and continued singing his praises. In recent years, he's been able to publish novels and short stories for adult readers and has been awarded lifetime achievement prizes in horror and mystery writing.
I really like how you’re willing to listen to other readers, notice consensus and broadcast such. It gets me right over to Libby to place a hold or at least wishlist ‘em.