I think it’s super cool that Stine continually sets his young characters up to identify wrongdoing or fear in their environments and to shut it down, even if the adults around them are slow to believe them. In spite of my general reservations about the series (most of which exist only because I personally don’t like scary things!), I’m very on board with this. Stine’s goals in writing the series was to maintain a consistent theme of kids triumphing over evil. More of my complete reflections on Night of the Living Dummy is below! ( Here’s a quick summary of the book, if you need it.) The lines between good and evil felt super blurry.īased on the research I did for both of the Goosebumps episodes I’ve done on the podcast so far, it seems like one of R.L.

Still, my feelings are pretty complicated, so it’s time for a True Story post.

While prepping to record this episode, I discovered that this is one of the more iconic titles in the Goosebumps series, and I’ll admit that, on the whole, I enjoyed it more than I did Welcome to Dead House. This brings me to the most recent episode of the podcast, in which improv comic and podcaster David Luzader joined me to discuss the seventh installment, Night of the Living Dummy. I didn’t love the experience of reading the first book in the series - Welcome to Dead House - back in 2018, but I also knew it was time to give Goosebumps another chance. That being said, when I started the podcast, I knew that I would finally have to see what all the fuss with this series is about - and even though I knew the books wouldn’t be my “thing,” I was kind of excited about it. To this day, I’ve seen basically zero horror movies (even the iconic ones), so it should hardly come as a surprise that Goosebumps didn’t call to me when I was an elementary schooler.

But guess what? I couldn’t have been less interested. They were big sellers at Scholastic book fairs (throwback!) and drew big crowds every week when it was my class’s turn to check out books at the library. Even the kids at my school who weren’t generally into reading seemed excited about these spooky books. I grew up in the nineties, and the Goosebumps series was pretty much everywhere. But there’s something different about Goosebumps. After all, while most of the books I cover on SSR are rereads for me, there have been plenty of episodes on which I’ve talked about my first experience reading a book that I missed while I was growing up (like, can you believe I had never read Anne of Green Gables before Episode 33?). I was 27 years old and it was for Episode 11 of the pod.Ĭonsidering the fact that I run a podcast that centers around the process of reading books intended for children as an adult, this might not seem especially remarkable. I read my first-ever Goosebumps book in the summer of 2018.

Goosebumps dummy book