here are some other acquaintances of mine renewed over the course of a year of pandemic: a haunted mask that melts into the wearer’s skin; a can of something called monster blood; ventriloquist dummy, comes to life. I’ve been meeting them in the hour before I go to sleep every night, on the pages of goosebumps books. i started resurrecting these monsters a year ago, after reading a profile of stine in the old days, and have made steady progress through the series despite my guilty conscience that i outgrew its target readers more ago of a decade. but reviewing them in the depths of quarantine-induced stagnation, I quickly developed a sincere appreciation for their variety (there are over 200 books) and their extreme readability (they seem made to be devoured in one sitting). the wildly imaginative monsters do not condescend to the sensibilities of a 10-year-old, or a 24-year-old. instead, they offer a kind of escapism that has become especially necessary of late.
Thanks to Goosebumps, I’ve been able to replace some of last year’s true horrors with scares outlandish enough to laugh at. In large part, this is because my former terror of stine’s monsters has mellowed into an appreciation of his nightmarish logic. My favorite of the goosebump-inducing books, for sheer gross-out absurdity factor, is “The Horror at Jelly Camp,” about an underground-dwelling slime blob called the Jelly King who sweats snails and relies on the care of tweens summer campers to stay clean. he eventually succumbs to his own stench when the campers refuse to wipe their snail sweat any further. the story reminded me of the unspoken rule of “goosebumps” books: most monsters stay within their own circles of hell: the devil in his mansion, the swamp thing in his swamp. (king jellyjam never leaves his underground lair). this separation means that the goosebump-inducing horrors of a book are carefully circumscribed, that the stories are imbued with a sense of narrative coherence more commonly associated with fairy tales. reading them is like watching a magician cut his assistant in half, safe in the knowledge that he can trust stine the magician. no matter how bad things seem in the middle of the act, you’re sure everything will work out neatly in the end.
You are reading: New goosebumps books 2021
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My parents, scientists by training and disposition, continue to be confused by my fascination with “goosebumps.” but what they don’t understand, and what I didn’t realize until recently, is that books really are a bulwark against the numbing of the strange and the fearsome. In general, age has had a flattening effect on fear. the things that scare me have become less shocking, more pervasive; consequently, the boundaries between the real and the horrible have become more porous. Boogeymen and monsters under the bed have long since been replaced by more pedestrian concerns: dark alleys, shouted insults. my responses to these fears have also decreased. I let my worry eat away at me until I can bother to change my walking route. I feign deafness and move faster down the sidewalk. you can learn a lot about people from the things that scare them. I think elementary school me would be disappointed with today’s me. when did i get so bored? so shy? — but he might come to understand that a lot of truly scary things tend to be banal and are scary because they’re so common and likely.
Still, he would have wanted me to fear imaginatively and come up with equally imaginative ways to overcome those fears. goosebumps books have been useful to that end. At night, before falling asleep, I revisit a small army of fantastical horrors who have begun to feel like old friends: King Jellyjam and his cohort. his stories used to keep me awake until the early hours of the morning. now they lull me to sleep.
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