NRO Weekend, October 28-29, 2000
Keep Away from Children
A frightful children's author.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor------------lopezk@ix.netcom.com

am a city girl, born and raised on the mean streets of inner-city Manhattan. In college, I walked long alleyways in the dark to get back to my dorm at night. Point is, I don't scare easily.

And yet, it took me weeks of Saturday nights before I could get through R. L. Stine's latest few books. One night I even begged my teenage sister to sleep in the living room as protection as I read.

Yes, you read that right: R. L. Stine. The best-selling children's author.

He was, as it happens, the best-selling children's author of … forever--at least before the days of Harry Potter. His "Goosebumps" and "Fear Street" series are both award winners and record breakers.

As your kids might tell you, Stine's "Fear Street" books are full of memorable scenes. Take this one from Cheerleaders: The New Evil that writer Diana West highlighted in a classic piece on Stine for The Weekly Standard in 1995:

…shock abounds at intervals of no more than 12 pages, as lithe, teenage girls are incapacitated, variously, by confetti-cannon backfire, immolation, drowning, a bus crash, and, most memorably, a backflipping fit requiring hospitalization ("Lena tossed her head back — her eyes rolling around frantically — and uttered scream after scream"). The convulsing coed is barely strapped to a gurney when Stine comes through with this (incidentally) far from climatic bit of carnage: The Tigers coach lay with his arms stretched out. The neck of an enormous green water bottle from a cooler had been shoved into his mouth. The huge bottle rested on his face. Empty. The water had all drained out into his body, Corky saw. The coach had drowned. His belly and chest were bloated. Like a big water balloon. What have we done? Corky thought, turning her head away.

Oddly enough, as Stine himself has said, his books are relatively clean. "I don't do drugs. I don't do child abuse. I don't really ever do divorce."

Just watch out for the blood on the walls.

Stine's new series, "The Nightmare Room," should come as no disappointment to fans. He instructs young readers to "open the door to terror." And that is indeed where you go from page one on.

Go ahead and scream.

No one can hear you. You're no longer in the safe world you know.

You've taken a terrifying step . . .

Into the darkest corners of your imagination

You've opened the door to . . .

The Nightmare room

It is not good writing, it doesn't make you think, but it definitely gets to you. Creaking floorboards. Noises from the basement.

"Cries of horror." "Shivers and screams." "Terror." "Fright."

In a word, our beloved R. L. Stine is a pornographer.

And parents and teachers should not confuse R. L. Stine with J. K. Rowling. Fair-minded people may disagree on the merits of Harry Potter, but Stine doesn't even come close. Harry Potter has a good story line, well-written sentences, imagination. Stine is so reflexively frightening because it is so simple. You hear the stupid house sounds as you read. A young child reads and jumps and shivers. And, in the end, the poor kid becomes used to the idea that evil is going to scare him, but it ain't gonna win.

So, why is it, exactly, that R. L. Stine is a staple at school book fairs and on library shelves? Visit your local bookstore and the children's/young-adult section is filled with him.

So parents and teachers, I have to believe, just don't know what this R. L. Stine is made of, and don't have the time to find out. In some instances this means they haven't looked at the illustration on the cover.

But R. L. Stine has been nothing less than a dream come true for millions of parents whose kids are reading and loving it thanks to Stine.

But is reading a good in itself? In a day when politicians drone on about the desensitizing influences of violence on television and in the movies, what about books? How many parents and teachers realize that menace sits on their kids' bookshelves too?

Oh, no, Fahrenheit 451 time! The sophisticates in the U.S. make sure that there is little to no room for public discussion of the quality and value of some children's books. The National Coalition Against Censorship is one of those groups you just can't oppose without being branded un-American. I saw that firsthand recently, The last time I wrote about children's literature for National Review Online, no bastion for liberal elites, the hate mail rolled in. Have I read the Constitution?

"What's wrong with a little censorship?" Culture critic Roger Kimball wisely asked this question in reference to censoring Hollywood in an op-ed piece recently.

Absolutely nothing.

Kimball, in reference to Hollywood, provocatively endorsed government censorship. Fair-minded people would vociferously disagree. Part of the greatness of America is the freedom of speech, and, however much liberals may not like it, inherent in our democracy is the freedom of parents to trash books. It's not the thought crime the Freedom Forum thinks it is. Their freedom to trash a book, to rally their public-school board to, yes, ban a book from a school or school district, to e-mail their kid's teacher with a book report and advisory, is just as alive as R. L. Stine's right to write his little books.

And, at least the book banners are right morally. Again, Kimball:

Even if one is an absolutist when it comes to the First Amendment, it is worth noting that the existence of a right to do something does not mean that it is a morally or socially acceptable thing to do. As John Searle, the philosopher, has observed, "any healthy human institution — family, state, university, ski team — grants its members rights that far exceed the bounds of morally acceptable behavior. . . . The gulf between the rights granted and the performance expected is bridged by the responsibility of the members.

There is quite enough about the world to frighten kids and steal their innocence. They can certainly do without more R. L. Stine.