were only loosely interrelated, and the Goose-
bumps series for younger readers had no common
thread at all.
Many of the Fear Street books involve no fan-
tastic or supernatural elements, but the Goose-
bumps books almost always include some kind of
monster. The Fear Street novels generally have
deeper characterization and a more serious tone,
and the violence is less cartoonish, although the
subset The Ghosts of Fear Street is much like the
Goosebumps series, with plots involving fish that
mutate and leave their fishbowl and similar absur-
dities. Fear Street novels typically follow the view-
point of a teenager, usually a girl, who faces some
sort of threat. In Bad Dreams(1994), for example,
the protagonist is troubled by recurring dreams of a
horrifying murder and tries to disavow her clair-
voyant power. The plots are often standard horror
themes restructured for young characters and are
often somewhat less than plausible. An ancient
curse affects the current generation in The Burning
(1993), and a high school experiment gone awry
reanimates the dead in The Bad Girl(1998). The
First Horror(1994) is a predictable haunted house
tale, and Goodbye Kiss(1992) involves a standard
vampire. Many others are variations on familiar
ghost stories. The best of the Fear Street novels are
The New Evil(1994), in which an evil spirit preys
on cheerleaders, and The Perfect Date(1996), a
ghost story.
The Goosebumps books are considerably less
serious, even when they involve equally horrifying
themes. With titles such as The Cuckoo Clock of
Doom(1995), Eat Cheese and Barf(1996), It Came
from Beneath the Sink (1995), How I Got My
Shrunken Head(1996), and The Blob That Ate Ev-
eryone(1997), it is obvious that Stine did not want
his stories to seem too frightening. Other titles are
quite obviously mild satires of other horror novels
or films, such as The Abominable Snowman of
Pasadena(1995), Bride of the Living Dummy(1998),
Invasion of the Body Squeezers(1998), The Haunted
Car(1999), and Jekyll and Heidi(1999).
Despite the superficiality of many of the
Goosebumps novels, Stine occasionally incorpo-
rated clever ideas. Stay Out of the Basement(1992)
demonstrates that experimentation has an effect on
the experimenter as well as the subject. An ob-
sessed music teacher attempts to build the perfect
student in Piano Lessons Can Be Murder(1993).
Let’s Get Invisible(1993) proves that having a su-
pernatural power is not necessarily a good thing.
Phantom dogs bedevil the new kid in town in The
Barking Ghost(1995). Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes
(1995) also has some genuinely funny sequences.
The Goosebumps series eventually metamor-
phosed into the very similar Goosebumps 2000 and
then The Nightmare Room, but by the end of the
1990s it was obvious that the boom in young read-
ers’ horror had ended. Several episodes from the
series were filmed for television. Stine continues to
write in this vein at a much lower volume but con-
tinues to sell at that level even after his many com-
petitors have disappeared from the book stores
entirely. Stine’s horror novel for adults, Supersti-
tious(1995), involves a woman who discovers that
a college professor’s interest in the occult is more
than just academic and has a connection to a se-
ries of brutal murders in the area. It is competently
done but unremarkable. Nightmare Hour(1999) is
a collection of unrelated stories.
Many parents and teachers looked askance
at the Goosebumps novels during the height of
their popularity. They sported garish covers that
gave them a comic-book appearance, and their
titles and themes suggested death, corruption,
and horrible events. They were for a time im-
mensely popular, and while some critics contend
that their later decline was because the stories
became more rushed and repetitive, the truth is
probably that the fad had crested and would
have receded no matter how well written the
later volumes had been. Stine’s closest rival was
Christopher PIKE, who has begun writing novels
for adults in recent years, but Stine has so far de-
clined to follow suit other than with his one book
in that area.Stoker, Bram (1847–1912)
Bram Stoker is, of course, best known as the au-
thor of DRACULA(1897), which defined the vam-
pire for modern horror fiction and whose central
figure has probably appeared in more motion pic-
tures than any other fictional character, as well as
scores of novels continuing his adventures or pro-338 Stoker, Bram