Another Stab at Chills!

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The collapse of "Goosebumps" entails a very adult horror story. Those novels were packaged by Parachute Press, a firm started in 1983 by Stine's wife, Jane, and a partner, and published by Scholastic. As sales and royalties zoomed past everyone's expectations, squabbles erupted over the division of the spoils. Things got ugly and remain in litigation. "Basically, it's a contract dispute," Stine says. "Basically, it's about Scholastic trying not to pay us our share. They made hundreds of millions of dollars on 'Goosebumps,' and they're trying to keep it all." Asked to comment, Scholastic faxed the following statement to TIME: "Bob Stine and Parachute made tens of millions of dollars from Scholastic's publishing of 'Goosebumps.' We look forward to the court reviewing what Bob Stine did, and did not do, for the money that was paid him."

Now that's scary. At least both sides agree about the multiple millions of dollars. Those are heady numbers to Stine, the son of a blue-collar worker who grew up in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, where, he remembers, "everyone else was pretty rich." Stine picked up the writing urge at age 9 and kept at it through Ohio State University, where he majored in English and edited the campus humor magazine. After graduation, he set off for Manhattan and took a succession of writing jobs, including one for a magazine that invented its celebrity interviews. He eventually landed at, yes, Scholastic, where he edited the humor magazine Bananas. He gradually moved from humor to horror, and his apotheosis as a children's author began to build.

Stine and his wife live in a stylish, spacious co-op apartment on Manhattan's West Side (their son Matty, 20, is a junior at the University of Wisconsin). The author sits down every day at his computer and calls it quits only after turning out 15 or 20 pages. "I am a machine," he says, and he's not complaining. In fact, despite his legal battles and his eclipse at the hands of Harry Potter, he still feels he's doing fine: "I'm so lucky. This is what I wanted to do from when I was nine. Who's luckier than I am?"