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Goosebumps books

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Engimal

Engimal

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Sort of a random thread but it only just dawned on me how good the Goosebumps books were. I was just reading a list on some website of the 'scariest' Goosebumps books. The weird thing is, I can still remember the plots of these books just from the titles, a decade or more after I read them. Night of the Living Dummy, the Abominable Snowman of Pasedena, It Came From Beneath The Sink & The Haunted Mask. All absolute classics.

Am I overrating them, or were they really as fantastic as I remember them as a kid?
 
They were my all time favourites when I was younger. Had all 62 books in the series your talking about. I have the VCR of Terror Tower somewhere in the storage room. Brings back good memories thinking about them. I wish I still had the books...
 
hah wow flashback..

I could only think of 'Welcome to Dead House' off the top of my head, which was the first book of the series...

just looked it up on wiki and suddenly all these titles that I remember reading ..

Night of the Living Dummy
Scarecrow Walks at Midnight
Cuckoo Clock of Doom
Piano Lessons Can Be Murder

I read heaps of them... I remember thinking I was clever being able to finish a book in one night


I always hated how the parents were always called 'Mom' and Dad though... Mom just pisses me off when I read it...
 

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I still remember this one called something like "be careful what you wish for".

I remember thinking, what are you on about? Wishes are awesome!

Then story about this chick who kept getting smashed at basketball, wished "to be better than them at bastketball" nek minnit the chicks she's playing against turn into old grandmas or something like that haha
 
TheFreshBanana said:
I still remember this one called something like "be careful what you wish for".

I remember thinking, what are you on about? Wishes are awesome!

Then story about this chick who kept getting smashed at basketball, wished "to be better than them at bastketball" nek minnit the chicks she's playing against turn into old grandmas or something like that haha
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nah she wished to be the best on her team cos she was a crab and the other girls made fun of her...

after the wish she didn't get better at all but the rest of her team became ultimate spuds and they then lost all their games
 
I still have 40 of them on my shelves. I'm reluctant to re-read them and find that they weren't as enjoyable as I remember.
 
Read about 30 of them. The early ones were pretty good but later ones were ghost written to a formula so moved on to other things. The Horrorland game captured the atmosphere of the books pretty well.
 
Loved these books.

I've got a Goosebumps t-shirt which I found in a OP shop. This is what's on it:
gb18.jpg
 

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I was shit scared of the cover of Night of the Living Dummy, to the point that my parents had to hide it for years.

I always preferred the choose your own adventure ones, I think because they were shorter.
 
Were there like 'choose-your-own-adventure' versions of these?

I remember reading one as a kid and you meet this girl in the 'adventure', and I spent ages trying to find the path that resulted in me hooking in. She was my first love.

:hearts:
 
I preferred the "Point Fiction" books/series, which included authors like RL Stine which wrote Goosebumps as well.

Can still remember reading "The Baby Sitter" while I was on holiday in Hobart at the Salamanca Hotel, 10 years old, scared the living daylights outta me. Funnily enough never gave baby sitting a shot either :D
 
Man this brings back some memories. My first one was Deep Trouble which I got from a book fair back in early primary school days, I was attracted to it simply because it had a shark on it. Damn sharks were awesome back in the day.

Pretty sure I read all of them in the end, my favourite being The Horror at Camp Jellyjam, I always secretly wished it existed apart from the whole *Spoiler alert* washing the monster thing.

Downloaded an episode of the tv series a few years ago, was still actually pretty creepy
 

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Used to be obsessed with these books in primary school. Had all of the original series, a few of the choose-your-own ones, and a few series 2000.

Watched a lot of the TV series before reading the books. Used to get so excited when Ten showed the episodes, we recorded them on VHS. My favourite episodes were:
- Welcome to Camp Nightmare (Larry was hilarious)
- Girl who cried monster
- Piano lessons can be murder (Beautiful hands!)

The Headless Ghost episode scared the shit out of me as a kid.
 
These were a massive pop culture craze for anyone who was a kid in the mid/late 90s, particularly in about 1996-7. I had just about the whole original 62, as well as some of the newer G2000 series and many of the give yourself goosebumps stories (and the other novelty series as well). I remember in the monthly book club newsletters at school, the latest Goosebumps book was sort of like the latest blockbuster film at cinemas, everyone always desired the latest one. Between 1996-1999 I must have read about 100 Goosebump Books. After the G2000 series of 25 had been released, I moved on from the series (Harry Potter was becoming massive around that time). Earth Geeks Must Go was the last release I remember enjoying a lot. Its one of the chief 90s kid phenomenons, and the depiction of grunge era pre-teen life at the time was spot on.

I can still recall the first couple I owned, I am pretty sure the first 3 were Be Careful What You Wish For, Egg Monsters from Mars and Return of the Mummy. Beware of the Purple Peanut Butter was my first GYG book.

The scariest moments for me in the series were often the haunting, ghost-like, displacing implications. The third act of Ghost Camp had me up nights for a week. Same with moments in The Haunted School, The Curse of Camp Cold Lake, Ghost Beach, etc. Anything seriously disquieting like that gave me a cold sweat. Similar to the girl in the painting in Dahl's The Witches, it's those things that disturbed me most fully. Generally though, I just thought they were fun and thrilling adventures, and the GYG ones were particularly bonkers. Some of the premises were actually fun and wish-fulfilling, even if they naturally went pearshaped.

I am sure if I reread them now they wouldn't hold up all that well. I recently was thrilled to see that something like Redwall still holds up well (I had moved on by the time the mid 00s came, and recently gave one of the later books a go, and found the formula was still charming). But something like Goosebumps catered to a slightly younger crowd, and I also imagine it was very of its time, and might have dated.

As far as the late 90s went, I think only Pokemon as a craze really reached the obsessive heights of Goosebumps. And Goosebumps was a lot more gender neutral. About every 3 years or so I'll happen upon the Goosebumps Wikipedia page and revisit all those memories (some of the books I had completely forgotten until reading the title and jogging my memory).
 
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The GOAT said:
The cover on 'The Curse of Camp Cold Lake' really freaked me out.

Piano Lessons Can Be Murder was my favourite
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That middle sequence when she is unconscious and trapped in the ghostworld just creeped me the hell out. I can still recall exactly where I was when I read that sequence (a hour long weekend drive home from Kiama).

And yeah, the worst part was that the creeper was staring out from the cover, it was one of those covers you always avoided lol. Maleficent had a similar effect on me around the age of 5, she was literally my image of the devil. Could watch the film, but in a book I refused to look at a picture of her.
 
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