He got kids obsessed with reading because they couldn’t put his terrifying books down. Two decades later, Goosebumps author R.L. Stine shares his scare tactics.

October is a busy month for R.L. Stine.
The author behind the blockbuster Goosebumps and Fear Street book series—pulpy horror novels that became points of obsession for a generation of kids just learning that reading can be fun—has become expectedly accustomed to being associated with the ghouls, spooks, and scares of Halloween season.
“And then in November, they forget about me,” he jokes.

 Not that, at least in this particular October, Stine isn’t a bit complicit in his in-demand status. The best-selling author—to the tune of over 400 million copies sold since his first Fear Street book in 1989—is busy promoting the return of his Emmy-winning TV series Saturday on The Hub network, The Haunting Hour: The Series, and just released the first new Fear Street book since ending the series in 1995.
“I thought I’d killed enough teenagers,” he says about why he’s reviving the series after nearly 20 years. “But then I thought it’d be fun to kill teenagers again.”

 All of this, and he recently wrapped filming a cameo in next August’s film version of Goosebumps, which stars Jack Black, no less. The School of Rock clown and Kung Fu Panda goofball might seem like a strange choice at first to portray the purveyor of the first scares many of us had as kids, but when you get to know more about Stine’s philosophy about the marriage of humor and horror—he did begin his career as a humor writer for Bananas magazine, after all—the casting becomes sort of perfect.
“They’re so close,” Stine says about fright and funny. “When I go to a horror movie and the shark comes up and is chewing the girl and the girl is screaming, I’m the one in the theater who’s laughing. I don’t know that feeling of being scared.”

 Stine shows up for our conversation in New York City dressed in head-to-toe black, displaying an earnest fondness for the twentysomething fans who gawk at him as he walks by, shuddering as they nostalgically remember the chills he gave them decades ago as they bewitched the midnight hours on school nights devouring Goosebumps by flashlight. But he’s also careful to note that there’s more to R.L. Stine than going, “Boo!”
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