RL Stine: the nice guy who put fear in YA fiction on his new picture book

Millions grew up with his stories and Jack Black is playing him in an adaption of Goosebumps – and the famed writer owes it all to the ‘secret kids network’

As a pre-teen of the 1990s, my bookshelves were stuffed with mass market paperbacks. The titles came in embossed fluorescent lettering and the content was stuffed with the heady, addictive pulp of young adult horror, or more precisely Point Horror.

I was usually too busy devouring their contents to pause and picture the writer. But I’m sure if I had, in RL Stine in particular I would have pictured a man in an attic somewhere, isolated and gnarled and cutting newspaper clippings about killers for leaning towers of scrapbooks.

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