What modern fiction writer accounts for the...

What modern fiction writer accounts for the most volumes in your home? Before rummaging through all those shelves to tote up the Crichtons, Cornwells, Clancys or Graftons, try checking out the kids’ room. There’s a good chance the distinction belongs to R. L. Stine. And be sure to peek under the bed; at least that’s where--in a shoe box next to his other treasures--my 10-year-old, Davy, keeps his stash of Stine’s Goosebumps paperbacks.

As parents, we’ve had some doubts about the Goosebumps series. But after a period of adjustment--and one epiphany by the campfire--we’ve learned to appreciate what this phenomenon of children’s literature has done to spur Davy and his 9-year-old brother, R.J., into reading longer books.

There’s no question that Stine and the Goosebumps craze are monumental in proportion. The “Stephen King for kids” (as Stine’s publisher, Scholastic, bills him) actually far outranks that master of adult horror in sales these days. At under $4 for novels that are typically 130 pages long, 95 million Goosebumps books have been sold, according to Scholastic. That’s just since 1992, when the first in the series, “Goosebumps: Welcome to Dead House,” appeared. Like some Blob-like creature from Stine’s fertile imagination, the number in print grows monthly by 1.5 million.

Popularity, of course, does little to soothe the worries of a dad and mom. My wife Andrea and I were indeed concerned when Davy and R.J. started talking excitedly about the Goosebumps volumes their school was making available through school book-purchase programs. Our first fear was that Stine’s tales might throw too much of a fright into our impressionable young readers. Taking ordinary places or events--the basement, a trip to a theme park, summer camp--and adding the chill of a supernatural encounter might have them waking at night to look for goblins behind the closet door.

We soon learned, though, that by reading the books aloud with the boys, we retained some control over the “scare quotient.” Our first such experience was with “The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight,” the story of a farm family whose scarecrows mysteriously come alive and attack--after a seemingly endless chain of false alarms. It was easy to defuse the scary situations, we found, by pacing the reading or by taking time out to answer questions and explain what seemed to be going on.

“Scarecrow” did, however, bring up another parental consideration: the quality of the writing. I like to look for a skillful turn of phrase in Davy’s and R.J.’s books, along with an inventive storyline. I’m a big fan of Roald Dahl, for example, whose classic “James and the Giant Peach” recently enthralled kids and grown-ups alike in our family. Perhaps, on reflection, it was the less-than-compelling composition in “Scarecrow” that helped reduce its intensity.

Columbus, Ohio-born Robert Lawrence Stine, who now writes from New York City, certainly has the right credentials for a childrens’ author. He was editor of Junior Scholastic and Scholastic Search magazines for a time before producing a string of bestselling non-Goosebumps spooky novels for Scholastic. Maybe, I thought, he’s gotten a bit too good at creating ghost stories--and should take more time in the writing process than he allows himself in the scant 30 days Stine takes to churn out each new book.

Then came our camping trip to the Kern River last fall. For late-night reading around the campfire, we had taken along “Goosebumps: A Night in Terror Tower.” The story was about young siblings, Eddie and Sue, sightseeing at the Tower of London while their parents are at a conference. The writing again seemed hurried and rough. The story, though, offered enough twists to capture marshmallow-toasters of all ages, culminating in the historically inspired--if not entirely historically accurate--discovery that Eddie and Sue are actually the incarnations of the 15th century prince and princess of York, Edward and Susannah, who were murdered in the Tower by their uncle, the king.

Nice plot! It led me to imagine, probably unrealistically, my restless sons getting excited by the idea of sightseeing during our next family vacation.

So now I find myself a Goosebumps fan--yet one with a new challenge ahead: Fox Television’s popular Friday half-hour dramatization based on the series now is beginning to interest the kids much more than the novels do. How fast they grow up: only 10 years old and already passing up the book to “wait for the movie.”