I was in seventh grade when my family moved from a busy New York City block in Brooklyn to a house at the end of this quiet cul-de-sac in Sag Harbour, New York. Being scared was kind of my thing. Fast-forwarding through Ursula’s menacing ballad in The Little Mermaid. Steering clear of the diving board at the public pool.

It never made sense that I would voluntarily read horror stories when ordinary life was terrifying enough. But everyone read Goosebumps, a series of horror novels for kids, and I was no different.

I kept my copies, hand-me-downs from an older cousin, in the closet. I could barely muscle my way through an entire book without slamming it shut and tucking it away again, where it waited while I gathered my strength.

I’ll never forget the panic of reading Stay Out of the Basement, the second book in the series, in which two children discover that their scientist father has been conducting cloning experiments on plants in the basement. Couldn’t my own father, an earth science teacher, also produce a mutant plant version of himself who would insist he was my real dad?

Now I was living next door to the man responsible for my nightmares. I convinced myself his house was haunted, a factory of goblins and ghouls.

So I told him about the ghosts floating from his chimney. The shadows creeping across his windows. The whispers rising from his yard. How I held my breath whenever I walked past his house, as if it were a graveyard.

“So funny,” he said. “I love this!”

Robert Lawrence Stine, who goes by Bob, and his wife, long-time publishing executive Jane Stine, have spent summers on the eastern end of Long Island for more than 45 years. In 1980, the couple had a son, Matt, and bought a cabin in Southampton. The house where we sat now, with its front yard of thick pachysandra that my Chihuahua once explored, has been theirs for 25 years.

“I don’t move too often,” R.L. Stine said.

The Stines’ main residence is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Long ago, they vowed never to move more than three blocks from Zabar’s. They’ve lived in their apartment on West End Avenue for about 30 years.

Before the Hamptons house and the Upper West Side apartment, Stine grew up in a tiny brick house in Bexley, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. “It was a town of big mansions and beautiful houses,” he recalled. “And my family was really poor.”

Last October, Stine, 83, returned to Columbus to take part in a month-long Goosebumps celebration. He wandered through the neighbourhood – “God, my house looked so small” – passing by the governor’s mansion, where he and his brother had gone trick-or-treating as children.

“Every year, the governor gave out apples,” Stine said. “Horrible. Horrible! My brother and I would just heave them into the street.”

“To be really serious, though,” he continued, “which I seldom am, I felt like such an outsider.”

He wore hand-me-downs while his classmates went to school in crisp department store clothes. The Stine family home, so near the railroad tracks, seemed like a hovel compared with the mansions nearby. He dreamed of escaping to New York.

“So I stayed in my room,” Stine said, recalling the low-ceilinged bedroom he shared with his brother. “You couldn’t stand up all the way.”

He spent hours at his typewriter, writing science fiction stories, joke books and comics. He devoured Tales From the Crypt and Ray Bradbury’s science fiction books.

He eagerly awaited each new issue of Mad, the magazine that taught him “how to be cynical and satirical”, and laughed through episodes of the radio programme The Charlie McCarthy Show, featuring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his wisecracking dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.

“All of that had a major influence on my sense of humour,” Stine said. “I only cared about being funny.”

Borrowing tuition money from an uncle, he attended Ohio State University, where he became the editor of the campus humour magazine. After graduation, he taught at a junior high school in Columbus. “It was the worst year of my life,” he said. “Seventh graders are horrible. They’re changing. They’re ugly.”

In 1967, he left for New York with US$400 ($700) to his name. His first apartment was “a horrible little studio” on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. “I had to call to see what the weather was,” he said. “You couldn’t tell whether it was sunny or not.”

He wrote humorous fiction for adults, but it didn’t pan out. “Adults didn’t want funny novels,” he said. “So I was getting rejected a lot.” To keep himself afloat, he took freelance jobs, including one at a sex and sadism magazine. “They would give me a photo, like a woman tied to a stake, and I would have to write a short story to go with the photo,” he said.

At a soft-drink trade magazine, Stine covered the latest syrups and bottle-cap contests. He also wrote for movie and TV fan magazines, where he was tasked with fabricating interviews with primetime celebrities. “The readers all believed it,” he said.

At night, he would work on his novels, undeterred by the stream of rejections. One, from Robert Loomis at Random House, read, “It’s funny, but it’s not anything we’d want to publish.”

In 1968, Stine secured a job at Scholastic as an assistant editor of Junior Scholastic magazine. He stayed at the company 16 years, eventually running a social studies magazine for eighth graders who read at a fourth-grade level.

“These were undermotivated kids who had reading problems,” he said. “So I learned to write stories that were exciting and easy to read.”

Jane Waldhorn, who would later become Jane Stine, was also at Scholastic, editing Dynamite, a children’s magazine. Stine eventually got his own humour magazine, Bananas, which he modelled after his beloved Mad.

“This was my goal in life,” he said. “I had done it.”

In his Sag Harbour office, he showed me several old copies, brittle and musty. One, from 1979, featured caricatures of Steve Martin, John Belushi and Robin Williams under the headline “The Wild and Crazy New Comedians”.

“They’re turning yellow,” Stine said. “I hate that. That means they’re old.”

Bananas folded after a decade. At 40, he went back to freelancing – writing colouring-book tie-ins for various cartoon series, as well as Choose Your Own Adventure books for the James Bond and Indiana Jones franchises.

He got US$25 a joke writing for the tiny comics on the wrappers of Bazooka bubble gum. He wrote novelisations for Spaceballs and Big Top Pee-wee and churned out joke books for kids.

In 1986, Jean Feiwel, the editorial director of Scholastic, who created the Baby-Sitters Club series that year, suggested that he write a teen horror novel called Blind Date. “I went running to the bookstore to see what teen horror was,” Stine recalled.

After reading Christopher Pike, Lois Duncan, Diane Hoh and Richie Tankersley Cusick, he decided his own attempt would be cleaner, with no drugs or sex, and a little easier to read. The result was a No 1 bestseller.

“Forget the funny stuff,” Stine said, describing what was going through his mind at the time. “I’m going to be scary.”

Jane, who had left Scholastic to co-found Parachute Press, a book packaging and development company, suggested he try his hand at a series for teenagers.

“I sat down with a yellow pad, and I wrote Fear Street,” Stine said. “Just came to me.”

As the book and its sequels took off – the series would go on to sell more than 80 million copies – Jane and her business partner at Parachute asked him to try writing something for children aged 7 to 11. Stine baulked.

“I was afraid it would screw up the Fear Street audience and they would start to think it was too babyish,” he said.

He agreed to give it a shot, provided he could think up a good name. Then he spotted the word “Goosebumps” in an ad in TV Guide. Scholastic became the publisher of the series, though Parachute retained an ownership stake.

The first Goosebumps book appeared in 1992. Soon enough Stine was producing two novels a month, one for Fear Street and another for Goosebumps. He described the pace as “factory work,” 20 pages a day with a break for a sandwich.

“I could write a 150-page book in a couple of weeks,” he said.

Coming up with stories has never been a problem. “If I need an idea, I always get an idea,” Stine said. He almost always starts with a title. “Sometimes, if I have a good idea for a story but can’t think of a title, I just throw out the idea,” he said. He builds his plots around twists. Each chapter ending is essentially a punchline. “I think horror is funny,” Stine said. “It makes me laugh.”

At the height of Goosebumps mania, he was selling four million copies a month. In 1996, USA Today ranked him the nation’s bestselling author. He had five people answering his fan mail.

The next year, sales abruptly declined. “The kids got sick of it,” Stine said. “They just stopped buying.” Then came years of litigation between Scholastic and Parachute. After the suits and countersuits, it came to an end in 2003, when Scholastic agreed to pay Parachute US$9.65 million for the Goosebumps rights.

In 2008, Scholastic approached Stine about reviving the series in a big way. There were new books, with reissues of the original titles. Spinoffs followed, as did two feature films starring Jack Black and a Disney+ TV series. Goosebumps had found a new generation of readers.

“It’s the best audience in the world, 7- to 11-year-olds,” Stine said. “I get them the last time they’ll ever be enthusiastic. When kids turn 12, they discover sex. They have to be cool. And they’re gone. Lost.”

In the world of Goosebumps, things are rarely what they seem. Children visiting their grandparents’ farm may discover that the scarecrows have come to life. The boy next door might be a ghost.

As an anxious middle-schooler, while imagining what kind of person could have cooked up those cursed stories, I made up a Goosebumps tale of my own.

Now, 20 years later, I had finally introduced myself to R.L. Stine, who turned out to be a friendly octogenarian. And the beast I’d imagined waiting at the threshold was just a Maltipoo.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Written by: Alessandra Schade

Photographs by: Dina Litovsky

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