'You know, they're not just horror novels,' he tells Martin. Stine says he's written 125 Goosebumps books, and in each of them he tries to maintain a balance between the scary and the funny. 'So I've been scary ever since.'īut not too scary. 'And I thought, forget the funny stuff, the kids want to be scared!' Stine says. 'I didn't know what she was talking about,' he says, but he wrote it anyway - and it sold well. It wasn't until an editor asked him to write a horror novel for teenagers - she even gave him the title, Blind Date - that he actually got into scary stories. 'I had no idea what was in store for me.' 'That was like my life's dream, and when it ended, I thought I'd just coast the rest of my career,' Stine says.

Stine says he wrote in humor magazines all through college, later running a humor magazine of his own, called Bananas, for the publisher Scholastic for 10 years. I found a typewriter, I dragged it into my room and I would just stay in my room, typing - typing out funny stories and little comic books,' Stine says. He did get an early start writing, though. Case in point: Darth Vader! What good is Star Wars without Darth Vader? Hannibal Lecter? Can't take your eyes off him!'Īs for Stine himself? Never mind the fact that he's not a horror - in a separate interview, he tells Martin that he never even meant to become a horror author. 'The villain is always sort of the most interesting part of the movie. 'It's always fun to play the bad guy,' Black tells Martin. Movie Interviews Read The Transcript: R.L. 'He's a really sweet, fun guy to hang out, with a really great sense of humor.' 'He's not a sinister dude at all,' Black says of Stine, in an interview with NPR's Michel Martin. Stine - or, at least, a version of Stine. Until now: Goosebumps has been adapted into a feature film, starring dozens of monsters and Jack Black as the man himself, R.L. Still, in the more than two decades since Goosebumps got its start, there's at least one thing the series hasn't done: made the leap from the page to the big screen.

Over 400 million copies of Stine's books are in print. The series has sported iconic neon cover art and memorable titles - like The Beast from the East and The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena.

The prolific author has written hundreds of horror stories for kids, none more popular than his long-running series of frightfests, Goosebumps. If you are - or have ever had or been - a kid, if you like to read and you like to creep yourself out, then you probably know the name R.L. Hopper Stone, SMPSP/Courtesy of Columbia Pictures Stine on the set of the film adaptation of Goosebumps.

The secret by rl stine