Ordinary Monstrosity: The World of Goosebumps

When R. L. Stine's Goosebumps books first appeared, only a few years ago, many parents, teachers, and librarians viewed the mere existence of the new series as a monstrous intrusion into the well-intentioned world of children's publishing, and the content of the novels themselves as an equally monstrous intrusion into the ordinarily innocent minds of young readers. But as time has passed and the series has continued to be phenomenally popular with young readers, it becomes harder and harder to find adults willing to be more than mildly distressed by Goosebumps. When asked about children's apparently insatiable enthusiasm for these books, most adults I've spoken to lately tend to say something along the lines of, "Well, at least they're reading something."¹

Comments of this sort clearly express dismay about children's enthusiasm for writing that strikes many adults as being not only unchildlike but also without merit—in a word, trashy. But the comments also acknowledge the undeniable presence of the books as an important and unavoidable part of children's literature, not so much an aberration as a somewhat off-putting aspect of the normally expectable, like traffic jams or tight shoes or a bad cold. The ordinary has expanded to include this one particular form of the monstrous.

Intriguingly, this change in adult attitudes replicates what happens in the novels themselves. In each of the Goosebumps books, something or someone monstrous and impossible intrudes into an otherwise ordinary world. Its presence causes fear and distress for the twelve-year-old child or children who must deal with it. But, by the end of the story, normalcy reasserts its primacy. Somehow or other—as I'll show later, it happens in a variety of ways—the boringly ordinary world manages to absorb the impossible and to continue on in its boringly ordinary way. What at first seemed like a serious aberration from logic and order has come to be acknowledged, expected. It's upsetting, perhaps, but nothing to be especially concerned or alarmed about.

Nor is it only the plots of the novels that replicate this pattern. There are a variety of ways in which the Goosebumps books invite their young readers to confront that which is usually identified as frighteningly monstrous and horrifically abnormal and to accept it as normal, not just in the world the novels describe but in their own lives and characters.

Marketing: The Invitation to Monstrosity

Before Goosebumps appeared, there was little that might be identified as horror fiction for young readers. Within a short time, the books in this series absorbed so much of the market that they might well be described as the books young children most often read or bought.² Once more, the monstrous became merely ordinary. The success of the series represents a merchandising triumph. How does it work?

To begin with, the publishers of Goosebumps reuse successful ploys developed by marketers of popular series for children over the past century or so. Each book ends with an excerpt from the next volume, a preview clearly designed to encourage further reading of the series. And not just reading, either: ownership. These previews are always preceded by a page that urges readers, "Add more Goosebumps to your collection." Each volume has a number prominently displayed on its spine, and the volumes all share the same graphic design, with different titles in the same fonts and different pictures in the same boxes. Like all collectibles, each book looks similar enough to the others to be part of what is clearly a set, but is different enough to make the set incomplete without it.

In Attack of the Mutant, Goosebumps #25, the main character, a comic book collector, has a conversation with a girl who collects a different and to his mind inferior kind of comics, and who tells him, "I don't want to sell them. And I don't care what they're worth. I just like to read them" (20). He scornfully replies, "Then you're not a real collector." The collectability and popularity of the Goosebumps series reflects the degree to which...