R.L. Stine has been murdering teenagers for 30 years.
Considered the king of young-adult horror fiction—he remembers being described as a “literary training bra for Stephen King”—Stine is best known as the author of the popular 1990s book series Goosebumps and Fear Street. In the same way J.K. Rowling introduced many a young millennial to the recreational reading rainbow, Stine’s prolific penmanship—at his peak, he was writing one Goosebumps and one Fear Street a month—is the core around which many ’90s kids developed a love of fiction.
Stine has continued to write since his heyday, and the 72-year-old author recently returned to his roots with a six-book revival of the Fear Street series, whose third installment, The Lost Girl, was released in September. Goosebumps, a movie based on that series and starring Jack Black as Stine, came out in October.
For a man who seems to know his place in the fiction canon—he has sold more than 400 million books—Stine is matter-of-fact about his popularity, a humility that seems in part tied to his family. Stine’s wife, Jane, is his editor (“It’s the worst,” he says, smiling), and his 35-year-old son, Matthew, has never read one of his books, despite helping with Stine’s website. “[Matthew] used to sell characters to his friends at school,” Stine tells me. “He’d say, ‘Oh, for $20, you can be in my dad’s next book.’”
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