R.L. Stine on the Stories that Give Us ‘Goosebumps’

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Living Dummy.” “The Haunted Mask.” “Welcome to Dead House.” For ’90s kids, R.L. Stine, author of the “Goosebumps” series, is synonymous with spooky. The series has sold over 400 million copies globally in 35 languages, making it the second-best-selling book series in history (after a decidedly less scary boy wizard). And after being adapted for TV, film and a new Disney+ series, “Goosebumps” has found its audience among generations of kids looking for frights. We’ll talk about how to tell scary — but not too scary — stories for kids, and why we love horror at any age. Guests: R.L. Stine, author, wrote more than 350 books including the series “Goosebumps” and “Fear Street,” and of the nonfiction works “There's Something Strange About My Brain: Writing Horror For Kids” and “It Came From Ohio!: My Life As a Writer” Caroline Smith, producer, KQED Mark Nieto, producer, KQED Blanca Torres, producer and reporter, KQED Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:41.9	From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim.
0:59.5	Coming up on forum, it's spooky season, and who better to talk to than R. L. Stein, author
1:05.0	of the popular Goosebum series.
1:07.3	Stories like Living Dummy, The Haunted Mask, and Welcome to Dead House continue to delightfully terrify kids while being a potent source of nostalgia for Gen Z and millennials who grew up reading his books.
1:20.4	We'll talk to Stein about the secret to writing scary, but not too scary, for young readers, and how he was once a scaredy cat himself.
1:28.7	Goose mouse.
1:30.7	Join him.
1:31.7	You'll beware. You're in for a scare.
1:38.3	Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Robert Lawrence Stein, better known as R. L. Stein, never intended to write teen horror and had to be talked into writing a spooky series for 7 to 12-year-olds. Now 350 books later and more than 400 million copies sold from his
2:02.9	Goosepumps and Fear Street series, also movies, TV shows, clothes and games based on them.
	...

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