It Came From Queens

An Ode to R.L. Stine

Reader beware—you’re in for a scare! Not really, actually. For some of you, the tagline I used to kickstart Thinking Man’s Month of Fear and Cheer may sound familiar. For others, it may seem a bit pointless to start a piece of writing with a statement that has nothing to do with what follows.

Well, fear not! (Get it?) This story is about something very near and dear to my frightful little heart. Something that has etched more imagination, sewn more ideas than anything else, that created a world in which I could grow up to think that maybe I could be a writer. And no, I’m not bragging by saying that I’m able to write this post, but it’s an honor nonetheless.

None of this would be possible if it weren’t for something (and someone). I wouldn’t be here right now. I would have had a different childhood, and thus a different adulthood. You would never have cared about nor ever even heard of your gracious writer, John Mistretta. That’s me by the way.

I’m talking, of course, about Goosebumps: the children’s horror series written by the one and only R.L. Stine. Without such a series, I would more likely be digging for gold somewhere in the thick dense woods of Oregon - or working a lame engineering job. Hey, wait!

Spine tingling, bone chilling, nose wriggling, teeth chittering, toe twizzling—yes, the Goosebumps series. There are hundreds of them, or at least over one hundred of them. I, of course, am the proud owner of every book in the entire series. (I’m not counting Give-Yourself-Goosebumps,¹ of which I have a few.)

One shelf of many housing my fabled Goosebumps collection.

Haunted masks, monster blood, jack-o-lanterns, scarecrows, vampires, mummies, and of course, dummies.

As a kid, which one can argue I still am (we’ll revisit that thought later), I was obsessed. I have great memories of begging my grandfather to take me to the library. It was something he used to love doing, before I got crazed with it. We’d pack into his silver 2003 Chevy Impala and take the five minute drive to the town library. It was there I discovered the books. I believe Why I’m Afraid of Bees was the first one I picked up. That wasn’t the one that drew me in, but I have a vivid image of picking up the yellow and orange book with a little boy’s head on the body of a bee.

My grandfather would wait in the car as I explored. Minutes would go by, usually hitting the hour mark, which is when he realized that bringing me to the library may have been a poor decision on his part. I’d collect as many books as I could carry, usually walking out with 5-10 at a time.

The library network created a spiderweb of opportunity for me to discover more and more. Loads and loads of books by the man called R.L. Stine—my hero by this point in the story. Our forays to the Queens Library expanded outward and suddenly my grandfather and I were traveling via MapQuest directions from Forest Hills to Jamaica to Astoria and everywhere in between. I needed to read them all. And that I did.

Once I read them all I needed to own them all. That’s when my collection started. To this day with Mr. Stine’s latest release, Slappy Beware, I have kept up to date to ensure my stock always had the latest and greatest.

All of these excursions weren’t for naught, neither the mileage on my grandfather’s car nor the library’s penchant for having all of these books readily available for the average little boy from Queens (like me). After reading, I started writing.

There I was from fifth grade to eighth, filling up notebook after notebook with stories. I wanted to be just like the man from Ohio. I even started my own mini series. I believe they were called GooseBubbles—very original I know—although I can’t tell you for certain what the title of the series was called, because I ended up sending the entire collection to R.L. Stine when I was in sixth grade in a hopeful attempt for him to notice my hard work. My series of short stories was shot into the void that some call the US Postal Service. I did get a printed letter back from the illustrious author with a sweet photocopied signature, but I never got to set my eyes on those stories ever again.

The icing on the cake of my Goosebumps-obsessed childhood was the fall of eighth grade. Actually, it was the fall of ninth grade, I’ll get to that too. We were assigned to write a short story by my English teacher that didn’t like me very much. It was my chance to shine, to show the kids in class how awesome my writing was. It was going to be great.

I churned out an eighteen page story—my longest at the time—about a murderer who comes back to life as a zombie to try to switch bodies with a kid.² It was the longest single piece I had written and I was extremely proud. The day it was time to share our stories I eagerly shot my hand up first. All of my classmates wanted to hear my story. The teacher, however, did not. She tried as hard as she could to pick other people over me because she didn’t want to hear all eighteen pages. I think five or six kids ended up going before I got my chance. I was only picked because no one else raised their hand to go as I was pumping mine up and down. The kids started asking the teacher to let me go and finally she let out a defeated groan and told me to go up and read.

When the bell rang at the halfway point, ruining my story, the teacher laughed in delight and told me we’d have to pick it up tomorrow. I tried to not let it bother me and picked it up with pride the next day. The kids who listened did seem to enjoy it.

I got a B on the story. I was crushed. After all the hard work it was really a huge let down. I put the story away and forgot about it (and writing) for the rest of the school year. I was still voted “most likely to be an author” in the yearbook—a prophecy which was foretold when I finished my first official draft of a novel last month—but I didn’t really believe it because of that teacher’s negativity.

Fast forward to freshman year of high school. I turned into a kid that didn’t care about school, reading, or studying. My English teacher, Miss Matthews, was leagues better than the teacher-who will-not-be-named of schools past. She challenged the kids and wanted the best out of us. I, however, having turned into the lazy, stubborn, wannabe cool kid, didn’t care to try. I flunked my first English test miserably, even though it was one of my best subjects.

Panic ensued at the thought of my parents finding out their bright son had turned bad, and I went to Miss Matthews to try to boost my grade. After a negotiation we settled on me writing a horror short story since it was the first week of October. I delightfully agreed, knowing I had the perfect story waiting to be dusted off. I gave her the same one that had been mocked by my former teacher. Yes, I really was that lazy as a kid.

One day after class she called me over. She had finished reading the story and was floored by how good it was. There just so happened to be a Halloween writing competition open only to twelfth graders being held by The Center For Fiction. Miss Matthews informed me that she submitted my story to them on my behalf. The universe truly works in mysterious ways.

Not only was a work I wrote as an eighth grader deemed good enough to be submitted into a writing competition for twelfth graders, but I won the whole thing! R.L. Stine would’ve been proud. Without him I wouldn’t have been able to do it, nor would I have wanted to.

Unfortunately, “Resistance,” as Steven Pressfield so eloquently put it in The War of Art, still had grasp on me. A chokehold that wouldn’t let go of me until I turned 24 and started coming up for air.

The hopeful young writer turned bitter and cold. Not thinking with an ounce of creativity or imagination, I blindly trudged through college, forgetting that I had ever dreamed of becoming a writer in the first place. No books were read. The world was a cold, dark place. The only constant in all that darkness was my mindless wandering into a Barnes and Noble whenever I was nearby, always making sure that I was stocked with the most up-to-date books Mr. Stine was adding to the Goosebumps collection.

It was a collection that grew, even while that kid who had dreamed of being just like his hero one day had been lost beneath a heap of things that one might call life. The child was dead at that point, or so I believed, although perhaps the fact that I still made sure to keep up with the frequent output of R.L. Stine meant that this wasn’t exactly true. Most people in this life aren’t truly lost. Lost is a strong word. “Misguided” may be a better word for the young adult I was blossoming into.

Then one day it all changed. I rediscovered myself. The little kid who spent all his nights and weekends reading and writing still had a pulse. My hunger for knowledge came back with a vengeance. I started reading again at a feverish pace, still not believing that I could possibly be a good writer. There was no way I could’ve given it up for so long and still be able to pick up and write at an adult level. Then something happened. I started to write. I kept going and suddenly, almost a year later, I had written a quarter of a novel by the time I turned 25.

It was hard. Resistance plagued me. It took every ounce of will to continue. In the meantime I saw that MasterClass came out with a course by R.L. Stine. I signed up. Suddenly I was working on an adult novel while learning how to write children’s horror. It was a fun time. Sometime in between I had been asked the question, “If you could meet your hero, who would it be?” It was an easy answer. R.L. Stine: the man I hadn’t thought much about for much of my matured life. It was a strange realization. With all the likes and interests I acquired as I grew older, I still felt like the one thing missing was a chance at seeing him.

So I kept writing. And in my spare time I had a great time enjoying Stine’s class on writing and revisiting some of my favorite books he’s written.

The crash came around August.

Driving back home to Queens from an upstate trip had me feeling lost—er, misguided. I hadn’t written my novel in over two weeks and had all but given up hope of being able to write anything worth a damn. After a lovely dinner with my girlfriend at a pitstop in Westchester, we came up with the decision to listen to Pressfield’s The War of Art on audiobook.

The book is a must read for anyone who needs a kick in the butt to get their lives on track. It deserves a post of its own so I won’t dive in much further on it, but it does talk about a higher power being at play in regards to a person’s ability to create their art.

That higher power was surely at work on that drive home. We took a pit stop for some coffee. While at Starbucks my girlfriend said she wanted to visit a Barnes and Noble. There was one just a few minutes away. I said no. We got in the car. A couple moments into the ride I had a change of heart. We’d go to a Barnes and Noble, just not the one close by. We drove an extra fifteen minutes and ended up at the one in Scarsdale.

This is where it gets interesting. We browsed for a few minutes before I decided to take my usual walk to the Goosebumps section. That’s where I stumbled upon the higher power Pressfield was talking about in the book.

A table stacked with a variety of R.L. Stine books stood at the entrance to the children’s section. I was confused. I slowly panned my vision up from the titles to see a picture of the man’s face. Below the face, text. He was having a book signing at that very Barnes and Noble in a month! I was in shock. The day of reckoning was finally upon me.

I had purpose. I needed to prepare. How could I meet my childhood hero and not be able to tell him about my finished novel? I needed to act fast.

Within two weeks I had finished the novel. It was a huge milestone. I’m still working on the second draft, but the first is always the hardest.

Things just got better from there. Mr. Stine tweeted about another book signing. Within 3 weeks I’d finish a book and get two chances to meet the man himself.

The first signing transported me into the mind of an elementary school kid. In a couple of footsteps of walking from line to his signing desk I had regressed fifteen years into the past. I was a whispering, shy, and shocked kid getting the chance of a lifetime. I thanked him for my childhood and told him I’d finished my novel because of him. He wished me luck in my writing and I nearly shed a tear on the drive home from the experience.

The second meeting (the one back up in Westchester) was a delightful experience where Bob Stine stood before us on a little stage. He cracked joke after joke and showed us loyal fans why his first pen name was Jovial Bob. This second encounter brought a calm and collected Will. I was able to face him without the childlike fear that had plagued me in our last meeting. He was a genuinely nice and funny person who seemed touched when I told him I was working on his MasterClass. I got my books signed and walked off triumphantly, knowing we’d meet each other again once my inevitable success breaks through.

Slappy Beware, signed (by hand this time) by R.L. Stine at the Scarsdale Barnes and Noble.

A cold wind whips through the street. Orange and red leaves flutter off their trees and surround me in a mystical realm of fall colors. A jack-o’-lantern smiles at me from the concrete stoop of the house to my right. The sun is beginning to set. There’s a cackle in the distance. Is it a witch—or worse? It feels all warm and fuzzy.

The horrifying stories R.L. Stine told us as children fill me with happy nostalgia and excitement. The world around us is full of imagination. Like Bob Stine, we can use it to create our own stories, books, and worlds. An escape for people to get lost in, as I did in his books.

Will I ever be as successful as R.L. Stine? Probably not. I will be as successful as I let myself become. The only thing stopping me is me. The same goes for you and anyone else out there with a dream. Thank you, Mr. Stine, for my childhood and everything you’ve helped me to become. I wouldn’t be writing this—or anything else—without you.

As I discussed in the beginning of this essay, we will be celebrating Halloween on Thinking Man with a series of appropriately-themed pieces. I’m going to be posting a new short story each weekend until October 31st (one of these may be the aforementioned murderer-turned-zombie story), and we have a lot of other great things in store for you also. Stay tuned.

Let’s start a dialogue. Comment your opinion of Goosebumps, writing, or any other thoughts this essay may have sparked.

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1. My reasoning for this (and a factoid for any lesser Goosebumps fanatics out there) is that this series was ghostwritten, and not actually written by R.L. Stine. Therefore, I do not consider it “canon.”

2. I will revisit this story in an announcement at the end of this post.