Some people hate first person for the following reason: At times he steps out and describes himself speaking in a ‘shrill’ voice, or something like that, suggesting that actually third person would probably have been better. The narrator is a first person 12-year-old boy recounting his story to an unseen audience. Stine does things in his Goosebumps stories that anyone who’s attended any kind of writing class will have been warned against.
The writing isn’t good (though perhaps a little better than Christopher Pike). There’s nothing embellished about this voice. My daughter is about to go on her first ever school camp, so I thought this was a good one to start with. It is also part of the Campfire and Fright Light collections. Welcome To Camp Nightmare is Classic Goosebumps #14. (I feel the same way about The Girl On The Train.) Stine has said, “I was very disappointed with The Girl on the Train. I thought it was humorless,” which conveys something of his attitude toward non-comedy genre fiction needing a bit of comedy regardless. They’re not laugh-a-minute or anywhere near it, but anyone who has seen a lot of horror will recognise the tropes to the point where the whole story feels like a genre parody. While these books may be genuinely scary for kids (I guess?) they read as horror comedy for an adult. It’s so easy when writing horror to inadvertently tip into comedy territory that you’re actually safer to just write horror comedy. Reading them as an adult, these aren’t straight horrors.
This is broken into 22 chapters, so that averages about 1000 words a chapter. Goosebumps books are not illustrated, making the books much slimmer (and quicker to pump out). The Goosebumps books are about 23,000 words long, which is only slightly longer than your average Wimpy Kid novel. A Cleverly Told Modern Story #booktube #bookish #readingvlog
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