I Remember Being a 90s Kid

Although I was born in the 80s, my clearest memories growing up are from the 90s. It was still an analog era even though the internet began its explosion in this decade into the phenomenon that it is now. It was still a time of Saturday morning cartoons and prizes in cereal boxes. It seemed like every kid was a fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (I was and still am). Video games were rapidly expanding and advancing (at the beginning of the decade, 8-bit graphics were getting old, but soon moved onto 16 and 32-bit, and then 64). Although cell phones gradually became more of a thing, I grew up in a time when kids didn't depend on texting and if they were contacted by their parents while at school, the front office would relay the necessary info over the intercom. Going to the movies was cheaper and superhero films were still getting their sea-legs. It was a time when I had few worries. Although I was a neurotic kid with a ton of anxiety, I miss those times. The 90s was also the time for R.L. Stine and Goosebumps.

I don't recall when I first started seeing Stine's books on the shelves, but they became easy to find. Before stories of J.K. Rowling appeared on the news, telling of her inspiring millions of kids to read, there was Stine. The Goosebumps books were fun, a friendly primer to horror. I had already started sinking my teeth into the E.C. Comics reprints by then, so I immediately realized that the format of the Goosebumps covers copied that. As a matter of fact, Stine was an E.C. Comics fan from back in the good ol' days when the only opportunity he had to read them was at the barber shop, and so he would get a haircut once a week.

To the even the casual horror fan, the Goosebumps books are light fare. They're meant to be light since they were written for kids. While not violent or terribly scary, I remember those books having a staying power that still affects me. Sometimes, the endings were disquieting and not wrapped up as neatly as you would assume in a children's book. If anything, these books gave a taste for the supernatural while still being approachable. I vaguely recall parent groups getting upset over them, although, like almost every time parents throw a fit over popular culture, it's an overreaction.

If you are around my age, you probably saw these books at your grocery store. I even re-read some here and there when nostalgia hits me. Probably one of the most effective books was one called The Haunted Mask. It takes place on Halloween in which a timid little girl wants to get back at her friends for always scaring her. She finds a terrifying mask in a store, but she finds after wearing that it is changing her personality, not only making her terrifying to other kids but more aggressive and violent. This one got under my skin a little bit, probably because of the theme of being taken over by an evil force, a force that could bend you to its will if you gave it an inch. Like many of Stine's books, this one ends with a twist.

Night of the Living Dummy introduces one of Stine's most enduring characters, Slappy the puppet. He's a malevolent ventriloquist dummy who shows up in a several books and had a Goosebumps series named after him. While I could name more terrifying villains, this one is freaky for a kid book. Face it, dummies are disturbing. A quick look on Wikipedia revealed to me that he is the mascot of the series.

Attack of the Mutant was a memorable one for me as a kid. It was a story about a kid's favorite comic book villain coming to life and of course, it's easy to get my attention when comic books are the main subject. The cover was also fun. One Day in Horrorland was probably my first, being about a family who goes on a trip and end up at the Horrorland amusement park. It turns out that the monsters there are real and so are the dangers. There are a bunch of others that were entertaining reads: The Werewolf of Fever Swamp, Say Cheese and Die (another good cover), The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight, A Night in Terror Tower, Welcome to Camp Nightmare, and Monster Blood.

As a 90s kid, I was also treated to the Goosebumps tv series. It had an abundance of cheesy moments but still fun to watch. Around eight years ago or so, Goosebumps hit the big screen with Jack Black playing a misanthropic Stine whose creations come pouring out into the real world. I had a lot of fun with that one. It's funny because the real Stine made a cameo as "Mr. Black." From what I gather, Stine is a funny, down-to-earth guy like so many writers of the supernatural. Recently, Disney+ came out with another Goosebumps series, this being one more adult-themed than the others and I enjoyed it a great deal. A few years ago, Stine's Fear Street books, or at least their concept, were adapted into a Netflix movie trilogy. Overall, I liked them, the first entry being the best. I remember one reviewer saying that it reinvented the slasher movie, and I think it did. There's another Fear Street movie in the works that I look forward to trying out.

My taste in horror is diverse. For me, my favorite horror writers come from the late 19th to the early 20th century, with a dip back into the 70s and 80s, including Blackwood, Bierce, Machen, Poe, Lovecraft, Bloch, Howard, Wellman, King, Campbell, and many others. R.L. Stine helped me get started on my horror education, and if anything, he got me to read, which was something I needed at a time when watching tv and playing Nintendo were convenient temptations. If you aren't against reading kid books, pay his work a visit, or at least introduce them to your kids. I'm going to introduce them to my 6-year-old soon and maybe I'll have a young horror fanatic on my hands in due time.

Written by Nicholas Montelongo