thought on his body of work?
>>25423643Pure unadulterated kino. The school library always had a shortage because these were the first ones to go.
>>25423643Actual goyslop
i've read the first 8 within the last couple of years and they're generally good, some are pretty good even. they all follow a similar formula but he's good at what he does
>>25423643Loved him as a child
>>25423643I enjoyed these books as a kid but they was kinda corny sometimes.
christopher pike was a million times better and doesn't get any recognition like stein does or worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Hmmm....
>>25423643The success of Goosebumps was 100% thanks to the cover illustrations. The stories themselves were trash. We just deluded ourselves into thinking they were good because we liked the covers. Half of every book was a painfully slow introduction. I remember in Say Cheese or Die it took forever for them to actually find the camera, and then it took even longer for them to uncover the premise of the goddamn story. And my memory is hazy, but the camera didnt even kill anyone. Someone would disappear, only to reappear at the end. So it was a bait and switch too. I must have gone though at least a dozen of these books as a kid and all I remember are the kids faffing about for 100 pages before the story actually gets spooky. And even then most of the spooks turn out to be false alarms. If they were well written why hasnt RL Stine written anything good since? I know he lost the brand name, but he's still writing horror stuff. I'm not asking why he cant catch lighting in a bottle a second time, I'm asking why does no one care about his stuff anymore? If he were a good writer surely there would be some readership. Same thing with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. 100% of its success was from the illustrations.
>>25423734I read one Pike book when I was young and it was complete trash. The Visitor. Did I get a bad one?
>>25423643The VHS of The Werewolf of Fever Swamp scared the shit out of me as a kid and after a recent rewatch I can't for the life of me figure out why it did.
>>25423766>Same thing with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. 100% of its success was from the illustrations.I am the vindow viper
>>25423773yes read magic fireinspired a certain 1999 cyberpunk movie btw
>>25423643Most of the books do have interesting and unique concepts, it’s just that he likely had to rushed them out due to the deadlines, so he wouldn’t be able to go back and edit out some of the stupid parts that his publisher should have helped him with, which would have make most of the existentialist themes he implemented into the premises of his stories aged well into the present time, especially when it comes to literary analysis of “children’s literature”.Also, the book and TV version of Don’t Go to Sleep came out in 1997 which predated The Matrix by two years, shared similar motifs with that movie but had a much better thriller narrative execution.
>>25423643>it's will just fucking kill youKino
>>25423643BASED
>>25423688
>A recontextualization of “Welcome to Dead House” becomes less a supernatural thrill ride and more of a field study: a story about what’s left when industrial ambition burns through its own promise. In this analysis, the “dead house” isn’t haunted so much as exhausted in an abandoned ghost town functioning like a corpse that still holds its place.>The plot’s horror elements shift their meanings. The town’s “dead” atmosphere mirrors the slow violence of extraction—empty streets that feel personal because they were once staffed by people who had routines, names, schedules, and livelihoods. The house’s isolation becomes an indictment of how quickly a community can be treated like disposable infrastructure once the profit runs out.>Even the book’s frantic pacing can be read as the rhythm of neglect: hazards accumulating off-page, then snapping into visibility all at once as the story escalates, the “monsters” stops being supernatural entities and start acting like an ecosystem of abandonment: rust, contamination, collapsed jobs, and inherited danger. The revelations don’t culminate in a clean exorcism; they culminate in recognition. The real terror is the town’s persistence after the people are gone—the way industrial abandonment can keep producing harm long after the original factory is silent.>So the analysis is simply chilling: the ghost town is not dead because it was cursed; it’s dead because it was consumed, extracted from, and left behind—then dressed up with urban folklore so nobody has to call it what it is.
read monster blood and listened to a few and so far it's been painfully mid, suspense and tension that cant pay off then gets brushed off with le twist that serves more as an anti-climaxcovers hard-carried
>>25423643I remember The Blob That Ate Everyone being the first non picture book I ever read on my own. The twist at the end probably had a big impact on my tastes.
Let's Get Invisible was the spookiest Goosebump
>>25423766nigga we were 8 years old
>>25423643Twas the shit when I was 10, but terrible as an adult.
>>25423803>inspired a certain 1999 cyberpunk movie btwThe 13th Floor?
>>25423779Is that the one with the gumbo?>
I've never read a single Goosebumps book. I was 9-14 when these things were publishing in the '90s and I think at the time I was reading more YA stuff like John Bellairs, Gary Paulsen, etc.
>>25424544NTA. Fuck you.The 13th Floor is an (unfaithful) adaptation of Simulacron 3, which is a great book.
>>25423803>>25424561So Existenz then?
>>25424568>ExistenzGood movie but, like The 13th Floor, not cyberpunk.I don't know what movie anon is referring to, btw, but it's got to be about a pyromaniac.
>>25424568Oh, and here's a webm for your trouble.
I never got into Goosebumps heavily but the one where the main character ends up in some monster kid's closet and the kid hides him from his parents like a pet until the end reveal that the MC is human but regarded as a monster by whatever the other characters were, stuck with me over the years.I was reading other fucked up YA at the time anyway, non-horror horror like Animorphs.
>>25424619>Goosebumps & Animorphs>fucked up
>>25424619>AnimorphsI went on a date with a chick who spent an unusually long time describing how well Animorphs was written. And she was like 30 years old and working on getting her own novel published. I wasn't sure what to think about anything I heard that day.
I remember the story about a bullied girl that tries to punish her bullies with black magic, but they take the initiative and turn her into a bird instead, it was fucked up.
>>25424634Animorphs is fucked up, yes. Especially in the later books. So are Applegate's other series, Everworld and Remnants.
