Blogging every single episode of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps

Is it genius? No.

Is it inspired? No.

Is it passable? Not even always.

Is it something you vaguely remember from your childhood, and therefore able with every sight and sound to set off deep and slumbering soul forces within you? Yes.

Is it available for streaming on Netflix? Yes.

Is it secretly Canadian? Yes.

Let’s do this.
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A few preliminaries though.

I mean, sure, those Goosebumps books ain’t Proust. Yeah, I didn’t actually read them, and just collected them for the covers.

But, I will defend unto my last breath the great “It Came from Ohio: My Life as a Writer”, Stine’s delightful memoir, which I read multiple times in childhood, and which helped me to learn that real life is more interesting than made up things, that the idea of being a writer is at least as interesting as writing, and that all authors are at their best when they are essentially writing about themselves.

Plus, the show, if not always the books so much, betrayed a clever understanding of the instincts of childhood, from the opening shots on. Here, in the intro to every episode, we see a faceless character with his back to us holding a briefcase that flutters open. This chilling figure, we see from the nametag, is none other than  R.L. Stine himself.

And somehow, you just know all at once that R.L. Stine is an undeniably SCARY name.
Why is it a scary name though? Why why?

Ah…
It’s because the first experience of every American (or Canadian) child with the syllable “Stine/Stein” (and they are the same, remember – children think phonetically) is not with Einstein. Still less with Eisenstein. Or Feinstein. It is with Frankenstein.

So of course R.L. Stine must be a writer of horror fiction. One’s child-logic is fully satisfied by this.
I was hearing on NPR the other day that apparently a statistically significant number of people seem to be drawn to enter professions suggested by their names. Waterses are pulled toward plumbing; Carpenters work with wood. (Unless they turn to directing). As a child, I went to see an orthodontist who was named, indelibly, Dr. Stitch.

So wouldn’t you know it? Stine writes monster fiction.

Anyway, this show.

Things to keep in mind, as we watch every single episode together:

This is R.L. Stine, so we must be on guard for THE FORMULA. This is the ironclad law of plot from which no goosebumps product can ever be said to deviate. It involves a series of GOTCHAS, or, if you prefer, RED HERRINGS, just before the chapter endings or commercial breaks, in which you THINK a monster has shown up, but it hasn’t. Then, in the last of these, the monster actually DOES show up. After that, various things happen, and the monster is apparently defeated. And about three minutes before the end of the episode, it turns out that maybe it wasn’t so defeated after all, or maybe, in this sub-Lovecraftian vein, it turns out that THE HERO WAS THE MONSTER THE WHOLE TIME! This, as you know, is THE TWIST, and its occurrence is the greatest and most unbreakable of all the rules of THE FORMULA of Goosebumps.

I’ll also be looking out for what I call the “OOTS,” that is, the secret Canadianisms – the subtle tips of the hat that we could not possibly have picked up on as kids, which reveal that, in fact, while the children in these episodes look and dress and act something like we do, they are in fact wholly and utterly other, they are in fact nothing short of CANADIAN!

Episode 1 coming along