What’s So Scary about R.L. Stine?

Fear Street and Goosebumps and Baby Sitter books are three of the best‐known series of American books for pre‐teen and teen readers going at the moment. Kids devour them and parents and librarians get concerned. Patrick Jones, a librarian from Houston in Texas, has put together a useful, well‐researched and sensibly critical review of Robert Lawrence Stine’s work. It not only tells us about the author and his background, his books and his publishers and the way he gets his ideas: it also opens up the issues of horror for young people, why it attracts, why adults get worried, why...