50 Fun Facts About R.L. Stine

What do the initials R.L. stand for in R.L. Stine's name?

Robert Lawrence. Stine says nobody in his family ever called him R.L., though: to them he has always been Bob.

Stine has been nicknamed the 'Stephen King of' what?

Children's literature. He matched King for output as well as scares: at his peak Stine turned out a new Goosebumps book every month, each written in about a week.

Stine's Fear Street novels are set in which fictional town?

Shadyside. In Netflix's 2021 film trilogy it is the murder-plagued neighbour of spotless Sunnyvale, a gap its young heroes trace to a witch's curse.

Under what alias did Stine write humor books for children?

Jovial Bob. Stine started out with jokes, not scares, writing dozens of joke books under the name, among them The Absurdly Silly Encyclopedia & Fly Swatter.

Which author does R.L. Stine call his all-time hero and the first writer to inspire him?

Ray Bradbury. His surprise endings shaped Stine's own plots, and Stine still calls Something Wicked This Way Comes the scariest book he has ever read.

What attic find at age nine changed Stine's life?

An old typewriter. He carried it down to his room, began typing stories and little joke books, and by his own account has been writing ever since.

Which comic books did Stine credit as an early inspiration?

Tales from the Crypt. He found it at eight or nine, along with The Vault of Horror, and says he and his brother went to every scary movie and laughed instead of screaming.

Which university did Stine graduate from in 1965?

Ohio State. He spent three years editing the campus humor magazine there, then headed to New York City to become a writer.

Which former Nickelodeon star led MTV's 2015 thriller Eye Candy, based on an R.L. Stine novel?

Victoria Justice. She played a hacker hunting an online-dating stalker, in a story taken from one of the few novels Stine wrote for adults.

What teen humor magazine did Stine create for Scholastic?

Bananas. Stine edited it for ten years, making readers laugh before he ever made them scream.

What was the title of Stine's first horror novel, published in 1986?

Blind Date. The joke-book writer's first attempt at a scary story became an instant best-seller and turned him into a horror author for good.

Stine was head writer of which Nickelodeon puppet series?

Eureeka's Castle. Each episode opened with a friendly giant winding up the music box that held the castle, a gentle world away from Stine's horror novels.

Where are R.L. Stine's monsters trapped at the start of the 2015 Goosebumps film?

In his locked manuscripts. Zach's snooping opens one and frees the Abominable Snowman, and soon the dummy Slappy is leading an army of escaped creatures.

Stine's Fear Street series, begun in 1989, was written for which readers?

Teenagers. The series' early success brought a request for something scary for younger readers, and Goosebumps followed three years later.

What was Stine's humorous sci-fi series before Goosebumps?

Space Cadets. Stine was still writing slapstick when his horror took off: the third book, Bozos on Patrol, came out in 1992, the year Goosebumps began.

Which children's book phenomenon first appeared five years after Goosebumps launched in 1992?

Harry Potter. Scholastic published both series in America, and Goosebumps sales were already cooling when the boy wizard arrived to take its place.

What was the first Goosebumps book?

Welcome to Dead House. Scholastic had signed Stine for only six books, but this one and its follow-ups sold so fast by word of mouth that the series ran for years.

Signed for six Goosebumps books, about how many did Stine write in the original series?

About 60. The original run reached 62 books between 1992 and 1997, which meant delivering close to one a month for five years.

Where did Stine say he got the name 'Goosebumps'?

A TV station's ad. Stine was stuck for a series title until he saw a promotion for a run of horror movies that read 'It's goosebumps week on Channel 11'.

Stine says Goosebumps was first aimed at girls; what then showed him half his readers were boys?

His fan mail. Half the letters turned out to be from boys, and Stine says he puts both a boy and a girl in every book.

Which Goosebumps book did Stine base on his son Matt struggling with a Halloween costume?

The Haunted Mask. Matt was tugging at a green Frankenstein mask he couldn't pull off, and Stine admits he stood there thinking 'what a great idea' when he should have helped.

Which literary classic inspired Slappy the Dummy?

Pinocchio. Stine's mother read him the grim original, in which the puppet flattens the talking cricket with a mallet, and he says it left him loving the idea of wood coming to life.

How does Slappy the Dummy come to life?

Someone reads words from his pocket. Saying the incantation aloud wakes the dummy, who then sets about making whoever read it serve him.

Stine says his Goosebumps stories never include what?

Death. 'No one ever dies in a Goosebumps book,' he says: any ghosts met their end before page one, so readers know it is only a creepy fantasy.

At their mid-1990s peak, about how many Goosebumps books sold each month?

About 4 million. The series supplied almost 15 percent of Scholastic's revenue, so when sales slowed in early 1997 the publisher's shares fell 40 percent in a day.

Which Scholastic rival series helped prompt the launch of Goosebumps Series 2000?

Animorphs. K.A. Applegate's shape-shifting saga had taken over the children's paperback charts while Goosebumps sales slid, so Scholastic relaunched Stine's books under a new banner.

Which Goosebumps spin-off offered readers several endings?

Give Yourself Goosebumps. The line borrowed the Choose Your Own Adventure formula, sending readers to a different page with each decision they made.

Which book revived Goosebumps in 2008 after eight years without a new title?

Revenge of the Living Dummy. Stine says requests from young readers coaxed him back, and the book opened a serial set in a monster-run theme park called HorrorLand.

On which network did the 1990s Goosebumps TV series premiere in 1995?

Fox Kids. Producers had been told that books don't work on television, yet the show became America's most-watched children's programme and held the top spot for three years.

Which Goosebumps book grew from Stine picturing a father with leaves sprouting from his head?

Stay Out of the Basement. The image became Dr. Brewer, whose plant experiments downstairs leave his children watching him turn steadily less human.

On which streaming service did the 2023 Goosebumps series premiere?

Disney+. The reboot lasted two seasons there, the second retitled Goosebumps: The Vanishing, before the service cancelled it in 2025.

Who plays a fictionalized R.L. Stine in the 2015 Goosebumps film?

Jack Black. He plays the author as a prickly recluse, a portrait the cheerful real Stine says is nothing like him.

What role did the real Stine play in his cameo in the 2015 film?

A drama teacher. The director talked Stine into it, and he says he is on screen for four seconds, speaks one line and was paid $1,400.

In Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, Slappy brings Halloween decorations to life using which inventor's abandoned tower?

Nikola Tesla. Once the dummy switches the tower back on, everything from lawn ornaments to a bowl of gummy bears comes to life and turns on the town.

Which film did Goosebumps director Rob Letterman make next?

Detective Pikachu. Letterman had been announced to return for Goosebumps 2, but he made the Pokémon film and Ari Sandel directed the sequel instead.

In the 2015 film, in which fictional Delaware town does Stine live?

Madison. Zach arrives from the big city expecting the dullest place on Earth, then learns the grumpy man next door wrote Goosebumps.

Which actor plays Stine's neighbor Zach in the 2015 film?

Dylan Minnette. Later the lead of Netflix's 13 Reasons Why, he plays the new kid in town whose snooping lets the first monster out.

What was the title of Stine's first novel for adults, published in 1995?

Superstitious. Asked to write for grown-ups, Stine first said 'No way', then gave in to some prodding and the lure of a $1 million advance.

Stine revived Fear Street in 2014 after telling fans on which platform that no publisher wanted it?

Twitter. An editor at St. Martin's Press saw his post and got in touch, and the first new novel, Party Games, came out in 2014.

Which R.L. Stine book series became a network television anthology in 2001?

The Nightmare Room. The show lasted one season but gave spooky early roles to Shia LaBeouf, Amanda Bynes and the Sprouse twins.

In Stine's Mostly Ghostly books, what do ghosts Nicky and Tara ask Max to help them discover?

How they died. The pair can't remember, so they offer to make Max's miserable life at school and home better if he will investigate.

Who starred in the 2007 direct-to-DVD film The Haunting Hour: Don't Think About It?

Emily Osment. She played a Goth girl who lets a monster loose, yet admitted that as a child she had been too scared to open one of Stine's books.

Stine voiced the uncle of which character on a 2019 episode of Arthur?

Buster Baxter. As 'Scary Uncle Bob', a relative who secretly writes spooky stories, Stine was all but playing himself, though he joked: 'I actually act!'

Stine ranked 36th on Forbes's 1996-97 list of best-paid entertainers; which director topped it?

Steven Spielberg. He took in $313 million to Stine's $41 million, yet the Goosebumps author still finished ahead of U2 and Bill Cosby.

Guinness World Records named Stine the best-selling author of all time in which category in 2003?

Children's book series. The 2003 edition gave him the record, though by 2012 Stine conceded he had been overtaken: 'I'm No. 2 now.'

Which award honoured Stine for lifetime achievement?

Bram Stoker Award. The Horror Writers Association's top honour put a children's author alongside earlier winners Stephen King and Anne Rice.

R. L. Stine's Haunted Lighthouse was a 4D attraction at which parks?

SeaWorld and Busch Gardens. Joe Dante directed the 22-minute film, which reunited Back to the Future's Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson and misted its audience with water.

What company did Stine's wife Jane Waldhorn co-found?

Parachute Press. The packager she ran with Joan Waricha developed Goosebumps, and Stine says its editors kept after him until he agreed to try scaring younger children.

Stine famously types all his books using only what?

His left index finger. By his own count it has typed some 300 books, and he describes the result as 'hideous and totally bent'.

Stine wrote Find Your Fate gamebooks starring which film hero in the 1980s?

Indiana Jones. Stine wrote four of the hero's pick-your-path adventures, starting with The Curse of Horror Island in 1984, as a writer-for-hire still years from fame.