In this “freaky” free-for-all-Friday, Trent revisits the children’s horror novels that ignited his love of reading and love for the weird and bizarre.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
It’s time for a freaky free for all Friday. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. On Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology, how to explain and defend the Catholic faith. But on Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about, and today I want to talk about two book series that scared me as a kid. At least they raised the hairs on the back of my neck, but they introduced me to the horror genre, to the psychological thriller genre, to the creepy and the weird. And I liked that. I think it was really cool. And when you’re a kid and you start getting into reading, I mean, it’s amazing to unlock the world of reading when you’re actually able to open a book and read the words and enter into the story.
It’s just something else. I’m sure you remember just the first books that you devoured as a kid. I feel bad, especially if there are kids who are not reading now, who are just addicted to electronic devices or things like that. Nothing can really replace reading a really good book. And people are attracted to different genres of course, but these genres, these scarier books, I really devoured them as a kid because they brought you into a story that as you’re reading it, causes your heart to beat a little bit faster. And then when the story is done, you think about the twist in the story and you think, oh, I can’t believe it. Oh, I can’t believe that that happened. And so then after that, when I read this book series, that’s what eventually got me into things like The Twilight Zone, watching old reruns of Outer Limits, the weird, the bizarre.
And then later on exploring and learning about the paranormal. I used to watch Sightings and Unsolved Mysteries on TV. And then I went on to start a podcast, Trent Horn’s Mysterious World. I’m just kidding. Jimmy Aiken does that. But that’s one of the funniest things. When I started working at Catholic Answers and I hung out with Jimmy, I realized we have a lot in common beyond Catholic apologetics. Whenever he brings up stuff on Mysterious World, I always think, oh yeah, I know that story. Oh yeah, I know that mystery. That’s so cool. So let’s jump right into it now, the two book series that I want to talk about. The first one is Goosebumps. Do you remember Goosebumps? If you remember Goosebumps, if you remember reading Goosebumps, then you’re probably around my age. So this is a series of horror novels that was actually written… The target age demographic was ages seven to 11. And so they’re short books. You can read them in, I don’t know, an hour, I can’t remember. It took me longer obviously as a kid to read them. But they’re very short books. They got really short chapters.
So especially if you’re an eight or nine year old and you’re getting into chapter books, it’s one you can pretty quickly go through. And it debuted in 1992 to 1997, that was the original Goosebumps series, and there were 62 books in the series. So some of you may have been familiar with the original books. If you’re the younger set, you may not know about Goosebumps. You may remember the film that came out a few years ago with Jack Black. And that was the idea that RL Stein, the author of Goosebumps, what If a kid found his house and accidentally released all the monsters from his books out into the world? And actually it was a pretty good movie. I actually enjoyed the film and having Jack Black in it to do RL Stein, he did a good job.
So that was the original series, 1992 to 1997. And then later there was a bunch of other spinoffs like Goosebumps 2000. And then RL Stein went on to write other horror novel series. So there’s just something about that original series that’s just really fascinating. So let me share with you a few facts about it. I’m going to talk about some of the books in it that I really enjoyed as a kid and how it introduced me to the horror genre. So originally Stein was contracted to only write four books, four Goosebumps books. They didn’t know if it would be good. And when he wrote the first two books, originally sales plummeted. They thought the book was a failure until kids started reading them and then it spread by word of mouth, which is amazing because of course in 1992, right, you don’t have social media, but it just went playground to playground, school library to school library, school Scholastic festival to scholastic festival.
You remember when you went to the scholastic festival ib your elementary school in the ’90s and your parents gave you a little bit of cash and you would go and you would buy a book there? And so Stein originally, he wasn’t a horror writer actually, he wrote comedy. He used to write for a humor magazine at Ohio State University and he wrote joke books under the pen name Jovial Bob. Later he wrote a horror book called Blind Date that became a bestseller. And so he started in the horror genre and his wife, who later became the editor of the Goosebumps Series, said, you should write horror books for kids ages seven to 11 or seven to 12 because there’s horror books and scary books for adults and for teenagers, but how do you write something for age seven to 11 that is scary but not traumatizing or grotesque? And so that’s what Stein set out with.
So the very first book in the series is Welcome to Dead House. And I will tell you this. What also makes the Goosebumps books really work are the covers. Obviously this is an audio podcast. I can’t show you the covers, but look up Goosebumps original books, original covers, not the newer covers. There are covers from the UK, there are newer covers for the books, and they’re bowdlerized. They are just awful. Bowdlerization, by the way, is when you take something that has mature themes in it and then you dumb it down and sanitize it to make it acceptable for everybody. The word comes from this guy Bowlder, I can’t remember his first name, B-O-W-D-L-E-R, Bowlder.
He wrote a sanitized version of the works of William Shakespeare to take out parts he considered offensive, which of course when you take great art and you go in and take out parts you think will offend people, you destroy the art and the process, you mangle it. It’s like the people who are editing the Willy Wonka series, Roald Dahl. So Roald Dahl wrote James and the Giant Peach, Willy Wonka. My kids love Roald Dahl. I like Roald Dahl too. It’s not horror like Stein, but it’s weird and bizarre. And so I enjoy that, it introduces kids to the weird and bizarre. But when you read Roald Dahl books, by the way, it definitely shows the [inaudible 00:06:20] there. Matilda’s a great book, James and The Giant Peach is a great book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is hilarious. I don’t like that book. My kids have made me listen to it with them on audiobook on long drives, it’s the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It’s called Charlie and The Glass Elevator. If you remember the end of Willy Wonka, right, they go in the glass elevator, you know the boy who… What was it? Wanted everything and he got everything he wished for, whatever, right? They’re in the glass elevator over the factory.
The sequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which is a great book, they go in the glass elevator, it goes into space, they board a space station and there are aliens and the American government thinks the Chinese or Russian government are planning an attack and there’s a bunch of stereotypical accents in it for the Chinese people and the Russian people. Totally bizarre. It’s like, hey, Roald Dahl, you phoned this one in, right? So anyway, sorry, I went on a tangent here. You have sensitivity readers with the Roald Dahl books. They’re going to go in, they take out when he talks about a woman being enormously fat. Instead he just says that she’s enormous. Or women can wear wigs, that’s fine. Sensitivity readers today, I think that that’s a crime against literature to have people do that. And Roald Dahl would hate it.
So with the Goosebumps books who are these horror books, the original covers, I remember the very first book, Welcome to Dead House. It has this dark blue house with a red door and it’s open and it’s almost like blood-red light coming out of it. And it just says, Welcome to Dead House. And it’s drawn not in a cartoony style. It’s drawn with more of a realistic style to it. And when you go back to the other Goosebumps books, the covers are very inviting that it’s like, hey, there’s something scary in here. Maybe you want to check it out. There’s one, Stay Out of the Basement, where it’s about a kid whose dad is doing experiments with plants and he becomes a plant zombie. And the cover is just this hand that looks like it’s made out of plants, holding the basement door from the inside, creeping out, stay out of the basement.
And there’s lots of other covers where you go through, you’re like, oh wow, this is an unnerving cover. Even the picture itself is a little bit scary, but it’s not so scary to repulse you. As a kid, as an eight-year old, you’re like, I want to look inside and I want to see what this is like. So I went through and read Welcome to Dead House, which the twist there is these kids move into a new neighborhood. The other neighbor kids seem kind of off. They don’t really quite get them. The twist at the end is that the neighbor kids are zombies and their parents are zombies. They’re the undead because of a factory that emitted this yellow toxic gas. And now once a year, they have to trick people to move into the neighborhood and feed on them.
So what’s interesting with Stein is that in the very first book, he said that first book was actually too scary. He didn’t quite get the knack of macabre humor. So in the later books when things would start to get too scary, he would drop a joke or do other things like that. Like I said, there are 62 books. Some famous elements from the books people know today is Slappy, the living ventriloquist dummy. He’s iconic. I think that’s Night of The Living Dummy. So those are a pretty good series.
My favorite books in the series, and I’ll go through a few of them here, how they stand out to me. One that’s considered probably one of the best in the series is The Haunted Mask. And I like when they’re scary and they include a morality tale and a heart dropping little twist at the very end. And Haunted Mask is about a girl who’s getting teased and it’s on Halloween. And so she gets a mask that she’s not really allowed to wear, and the mask turns her into a monster and she can’t really get it off because it’s changing who she is. So that’s a great book. One Day at Horror Land is awesome. It’s about a family that gets lost on the interstate and they’re trying to find their way to an amusement park and they end up finding an amusement park they’d never heard of, Horror Land. And it’s got all these people dressed up as monsters, or so they think and they’re going through and the rides are actually really scary and they think, wow, this ride could have killed me.
And it turns out the Horror Land monsters are not humans in monster costumes. They actually just are monsters, which I think is kind of funny because normally in a horror movie or a book, when you meet the monster, you immediately get scared. Here you’re lulled into a false sense of security. Oh, it’s just people dressed up as monsters. No, no, they actually are monsters. Or a few other ones. Like I said, there’s a bunch of different books. I’ll share a few here. By the way, if you don’t want it spoiled for yourself, maybe just tune out right now because I’m going to talk about spoilers because the twists are really what also made a big deal for me. It’s why I loved getting into the Twilight Zone. There are very good twists in a lot of these Goosebumps book. And as an eight-year-old kid, when you put the book down, you’re like, oh wow, I can’t believe that that happened or I didn’t see that coming.
I think the twists, some of them are a little cheesy, Twilight Zone-esque, they’re not that great. But when I was eight, it really stuck with me. One of them… So like I said, if you don’t want the twist spoiled, just stop listening now to the rest of the episode basically. There’s one called Camp Nightmare where the kids are going to a summer camp and they’re constantly being scared and monsters are trying to get them, and it’s like, we’re going to die. And at the end it turns out, oh, it’s just a simulation to prepare you for an important trip. We’re going into space to colonize, to go to a new planet, and it could be dangerous there. So we have to prepare you for the dangers. Oh, what’s the name of the planet we’re going to go to? Earth. Get it? They’re aliens.
So when I was eight, I’m like, what? It blew my tiny little child mind. But now, now I’m like, eh, that’s like a B-grade, Twilight Zone twist at the end of that. But others, The Girl Who Cried Monster, this is one of the earlier books and it’s good. It also has an unnerving cover, has a girl looking into a library and you see this creepy middle-aged guy holding up a fly about to eat it. And so it’s like, she says, oh, the librarian… Or he’s a teacher, I’m trying to remember. He’s a monster. He turns into a monster and eats the bugs. And she’s trying to explain to her parents, “He’s a monster, he’s a monster. You have to believe me.” Like, “Oh, okay. You always have monsters on the brain.” And then you think, do you think the story’s going to go in one direction?
Eventually the parents invite the teacher over for dinner and she thinks, oh no, this is going to be it. I’ve got to prove he’s a monster finally to them, and at the very end of the book, the twist, is that the parents are monsters. So the teacher is a monster and he says, “What are we having for dinner?” And the parents say, “You. We’re having you for dinner,” and the parents transform into monsters and tear him apart and eat the teacher. And they say, “We had to do that because we can’t have other monsters moving into the neighborhood and people finding out that there are monsters around, there hasn’t been a new monster in 20 years.” So when I was a kid, I put the book down, I was like, what in the world? Now looking back, there’s actually a Goosebumps TV series that does a pretty good job of dramatizing a lot of these episodes.
And Girl Who Cried Monster is one of them. If I had gone back in time, now that I’m older, if I were Stein, I would’ve included little jokes throughout the book that would land really funny at the end with this twist, like the girl comes home, the idea is that she knows that there are monsters around, but she knows her parents are monsters, but not that any other monsters exist. And that’s not made clear until the very end of the book for the twist. But it’d be funny if throughout the book she says, “There’s a monster, the librarian’s a monster,” and the mom says, “Oh goodness dear, the only monster around here is your father. Ha ha ha.” And you tell a joke like that and at the end it’s actually completely 100% literal. That would be genius. Maybe there’s a joke like that in Girl Who Cried Monster. I can’t remember. It’s been a while since I read it.
Another one that has a ridiculous twist that always stuck with me as a kid is the book The Horror at Camp Jelly Jam, all right. So this book, by the way, has a very unnerving cover on it, the old original cover. It just has this creepy, darkened camp. It’s not super dark, but it has the camp in the background, a little windy and there’s a camp counselor. And he’s grinning with an inhuman grin, wide-eyed eyes, and there’s something really scary and unnerving about how the counselor doesn’t look quite human and it’s like, what is going on? So they go to the camp and the kids who are the best at the activities get taken to a special… I’m trying to remember, by the way, it’s been years since I read these. And the winners of the games at the camp go to a special activity just for winners and they’re never heard from again.
And it’s like, what’s going on? What is the twist, right? What’s going on? And the twist is absolutely absurd. The twist is that there is a monster at Camp Jelly Jam. In the caves near Camp Jelly Jam, there is a big gelatinous jelly monster. Some jelly was left in the cave and radioactivity turned it into a big monster, King Jelly Jam, who sweats black snails. And his stench is so horrible. He needs the strongest, most athletic kids at the camp to clean his body so that he isn’t overwhelmed by the stench. And any kids who refuse get eaten. At the end of the book, the kids refuse to… And by the way, Jell Jam has the ability to mind control the adult counselors at the camp to get the kids. So they refuse to clean him and he dies from his own stench.
Who comes up with this kind of stuff, but I think it’s very creative. I like it. So that is the Goosebumps series that stuck with me as a kid. Let me give you another fun fact when it comes to Goosebumps. Back in the mid-’90s, there was someone who ran a popular website, The Bumps, or Bumps it was called. I think it was called The Bumps. And so he’s around my age, only a year younger than me, and he went on to have a career at CNN until he was let go recently. Brian Stelter. Yeah, Brian Stelter at CNN ran a Goosebumps website. Here’s a short clip of him interviewing RL Stein when he used to work at CNN.
Brian Stelter:
I have such a personal connection to your life because back in the ’90s, I created this Goosebumps fan website. I feel silly saying it now, but I was obsessed with the books.
RL Stein:
It was an amazing accomplishment.
Brian Stelter:
Thank you. I mean, I was just a kid and I was learning how to build webpages, but I was writing about my passion [inaudible 00:16:40].
Trent Horn:
So who would’ve thought, right? But it’s interesting, and yes, he and I are the same age. If you compare pictures of us, it doesn’t look like it but we are about the same age. Two more points on Goosebumps, Stein originally… I think at one point in his writing, he didn’t come up with the plots. After he had written so many stories that… There’s so many. You go through all the standard plots you can do with a horror kid book. He just tries to come up with titles. He just tries to think of a unique title and he makes a story around it. So he tries to think of one like Fifth Grade Zombie. So that’s a neat title and he just makes a story around that. Also, the original cover artist, Tim Jacobis or Jacobus, it took him 35 hours to produce the original covers.
Look it up. Original Goosebumps covers versus the newer ones, the originals are so, so good. Jacobus’s work, it just can’t be replicated because he really put in that time. It wasn’t just corporate schlock. He really put in the time. And that’s something that I miss. And speaking of covers, by the way, and illustrations, that takes me to the other series, this one scared me more than Goosebumps. Well, it was the pictures that scared me. They were downright terrifying. And that was the series, Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark. Do you remember this one? Now this book came out before I was born. The series started… The first two books came out before I was born. So if you’re a Gen Xer, maybe even Baby Boomer, but Gen Xer, you might remember reading these in the library. Though, if you were a millennial like me, the older books, they were in the library, you would go and find them and you’re like, what is this?
So the book is Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark by Alvin Schwartz, originally illustrated by Steven Gammell. And so they’re based on folklore. A lot of them are re-tellings of urban legends and folklore, and some of them are just downright creepy. So I think one of them, they tell the story like the bride who haunts the house because she went on her wedding day for peace and quiet to hide in a trunk in the attic, and it locked on her and she wasn’t able to get out and suffocated in there. So she became the bride that haunts the house. It also does classic urban legends like the babysitter and the man upstairs, like somebody’s calling and oh, the call is coming from inside the house and you’re the babysitter. The vanishing hitchhiker being buried alive. So some of them, they could be pretty intense stories, and along with making them intense are the illustrations. Once again, can’t do injustice here on the podcast.
Look up Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark original versus new illustrations. The original ones, they are creepy and scary. They’re drawn in a black and white surreal style to them, like the bloody scarecrow, the girl scratches her face and there are spiders coming out of the wound in her face. Creepy monster, old hags. Oh, those pictures still scare me. So in 2011, Harper Collins, the publisher of Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark… So this series, by the way, 1981, ’84, 1991. So like I said, Gen Xers, that came out for you, but millennials, you probably remember it in the school library. In 2011, they published editions of the book with newer artwork by Brett Helquist instead of Gammel. And the new artwork sucks. It’s so bad. It’s just not scary. It’s not scary. These are called Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark.
And they’re more haha, they’re almost jokey, cartoony. They’re not scary in any way. And there was a huge backlash. And now the newer printings of the book have restored the original art. So I am grateful to them for that. So, all righty. So that was my scary stories when I was a kid. And if you feel like you have young kids that can handle things that are a bit more intense, I can’t vouch for all the family-friendly quality to it. I’m almost positive there’s nothing like LGBTQ or anything like that. This is back in the ’80s and ’90s, but I am not able to vouch for if it’s okay for your kid. You’ll have to get the books and illustrations, read it for yourself, look at it yourself and see if they are mature enough to handle something this intense. So if it is, I hope it enkindles in them a love of reading for sure. But thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.
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