Word: stine
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...Stine's prophecy got the drift of the future right but erred on the details. It took far less than a decade for droves of young readers to desert his two series; and the other things he foresaw himself doing turn out to look spookily like the things he was doing before...
This week Stine is launching yet another series of chill-inducing novels for adolescents and precocious younger siblings. He has a new running title, The Nightmare Room, and a new publisher, HarperCollins. Stine insists that he is not in the business of repeating himself: "I always describe Goosebumps as a roller-coaster ride, all the twists and turns and crazy things jumping out at you. I see The Nightmare Room more like a fun house. You step inside this place, and everything seems normal at first. And then you look and you see, ah, the floor is tilted. And then...
Roller coaster or fun house, the first two books in the new series, Don't Forget Me! and Locker 13, read like slightly more sophisticated installments of Goosebumps. Stine's prose is, as usual, simple, his dialogue attuned to the speech of the young ("awesome," "totally lost it," "Duh"). The plots of both involve Stine's trademark: teenagers being frightened witless in a context assuring readers that nothing truly dangerous will occur. As he admits, "There's more teasing than horror in my books...
...Forget Me! shows Stine's knack for unearthing and exploiting the primal emotions of childhood, in this case sibling rivalry. Danielle, 15, can't understand why her parents and friends find her pesky little brother Peter, 9, so endearing. He's always trying to horn in on her fun. When Danielle and a chum are practicing a mock-hypnotism act for a school skit, Peter--natch--insists that Danielle hypnotize him. Uh-oh. Not only does little brother go into a trance and come out of it with an alarming loss of memory, but also strange voices start emanating from...
...answer to the latter question is never seriously in doubt, but Stine offers a battery of heavy-breathing, vicarious shocks along the way as Danielle struggles with such basic bugaboos as guilt, abandonment and helplessness. And he adds a neat twist at the end suggesting Danielle's strange ordeal may be getting its second wind...