But, do you really know what your child is reading when he is reading Stine?
Popular with both boys and girls, R. L. Stine will scare you silly. But unfortunately, it's not a “silly” matter. Stine’s books are not exactly fun and games. They’re more like blood and gore and chills and murder. And with no redeeming value — except perhaps that they are books, and not TV.
Stine has been one the scene since about 1994, when his Fear Street and Goosebumps books became the rage. Schools and bookstores flooded with work by “the Stephen King of children's books.”
Stine explained the popularity of his books to Publisher's Weekly in 1995: “They're going very fast. They're very exciting. You think you're going to go in one direction — they take you off in another direction. But no matter how scary it is, or how thrilling, or how exciting, you know that you're safe the whole time.”
In other words, kids, when reading Stine, are getting easy, thought-less thrills. Like any mindless action movie, there isn’t a moment when you’re not surging forward a million miles an hour. And like any horror film, you’re constantly scared out of your wits. But there may be yet another film genre whose essence would help explain the series’ success.
Writing when Stine had just made it big-time with his “Fear Street” series, fiction writer Diana West observed: “The sensation [of reading shock fiction], of course, can be strangely pleasurable. As one 10-year-old girl — a veteran of 40 Stine titles — put it to a Canadian newspaper, ‘I like how the creepy feeling and shivers go through your body.’ And so, reading [Stine] becomes a crude tool of physical stimulation, wholly devoid of mental, emotional, or spiritual engagement.”
Doesn’t that fairly well capture the working definition of pornography? This certainly is a disquieting thought. Scary fairy tales are one thing. C.S. Lewis argued that it made no sense to keep from a child “the knowledge that he or she is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice.” But pornography-related horror is quite another matter.
West continues: “After immersing myself in this murky genre (30 books in all), I could not help but perceive an unmistakably pornographic pattern of means and ends. As graphic, horrific, and exciting as Edgar Allan Poe's stories may be, for example, the act of reading them requires a mental engagement with language, with character, with the author's interpretation of events that transforms the action and elevates it above the cheap thrills of a rap sheet.
“But in shock fiction, a raw catalogue of horrors and grotesqueries is used — not interpreted, not stylized, not in any way transformed by a writer for good or bad — to charge the nerve endings of young readers. In less than deathless (indeed, less than grammatical) prose, shock writers deliver their fix-after-blunt-fix to shock (in other words, satisfy) their audience.”
Stine's latest work, if you are a fan of such easy thrills for kids, does not disappoint. Debuting this month are the first few books in his new “Nightmare Room” series for eight- to twelve-year-olds. Don't Forget Me is about a girl who wants her kid brother dead and sorta gets her wish. Other books in the series include Locker 12, which, needless to say, we would all be better off without opening, My Name is Evil, about Maggie O'Connor's 13th birthday horror, and the upcoming Dear Diary, I'm Dead.
Also from his new batch, available to suck in a whole new generation of children into his cheap thrills, there is a collection of stories called Nightmare Hour. This offering to eight-year-olds contains, among other things, the following substitute for Charlie Brown's “Great Pumpkin” classic:
“The pumpkin fell from my hands. And rolled. Rolled up against a long, slender vine.
I stared at the vine. Followed it to the end.
And saw my brother's head. Mike's head, sprouting from the end of the vine.
His dark eyes stared up at me. His mouth opened and closed as if trying to speak. His head quivered, then bounced hard as if trying to snap loose. But it was attached — growing — from the vine!
‘Ohhhhh.’ A moan of horror escaped my throat.
I couldn't speak or breathe or move.
My brother … my poor brother …
And then I saw the others.
Human heads … boys and girls … heads staring up at me from the ground … mouths opening and closing, silently begging for help … dozens of human heads, all sprouting from vines ….
Now I knew what had happened to those kids who had disappeared last Halloween and the Halloween before.”
Last month — you might have missed it if you don't have my politically correct calendar on your wall — we celebrated Banned Books Week, a time for First Amendment Absolutists to rally support against the simpletons who try to ban perfectly good books like Stine's. “Isn't this America?” they cry at the suggestion that parents and school boards might try to keep the likes of Stine out of their classrooms and libraries.
That exposure to the writings of Mr. Stine is going to lead your children to casual Shakespeare reading doesn't seem entirely likely. Surely there are better ways to encourage reading the classics. There are also more interesting, constructive activities for children to engage in besides reading about drowning their coaches and murdering the prettiest cheerleader.
Like memorizing their multiplication tables, for example.
