After taking an eight-year hiatus from his best-selling children's stories, the Goosebumps author is back this month with the first two books in a new 12-book series.
Was it good to return to writing Goosebumps books?
I wrote 87 of them—that's a lot of books for a human—and I never really planned to do more. But now I'm having a lot of fun with it.
Why did you choose a theme park as the setting for your new series?
It's a great setting for scariness because so many things can go wrong. I also like to use humor, and I think there's this really close connection between humor and horror. It's like when you go to an amusement park and you get close to a roller coaster, and you hear people laughing and screaming at the same time.
Were you into horror as a kid?
My brother and I used to go to scary movies all the time. But now I never get scared at movies or by books. At a scary movie, I'm always laughing.
Have you ever written a book that's been too scary for kids?
Once I wrote a book with an unhappy ending—the bad girl won, and the good girl was accused of murder. Kids hated this book. They hated it. And I got all this mail: "Dear R.L. Stine, You moron, are you going to write a sequel?" They could not accept it.