I’m lumping these two together because as much as I liked them as a kid, I wasn’t able to get access to many copies while I was prepping for this project, so I’m limited to one or two books .

First up, The Boxcar Children. TBC is a funny series because it began as a simple story about four children who were being sent to live with their grandfather after being orphaned, but they’d heard he was a grump who didn’t like them, so they ran away. The book opens with them traveling lonely roads at night, looking for refuge, and soon their foraging leads them into the woods where they find an abandoned boxcar. The book develops into a very mild kind of My Side of the Mountain or Hatchet, with these young kids (Benny is all of four or five) creating a life for themselves in the woods, made possible by the oldest boy Henry walking into town and doing odd jobs like handywork or picking apples. Eventually the kids are reunited with their grandfather, who turns out to be not grumpy at all, but a very nice and understanding fellow who even moves their boxcar to his back yard so they can play in it all they like. From what I understand, the book was so popular that fans demanded more, so the author created a series in which the Alden kids go places and encounter mysteries — and do so with such regularity that when the original author’s series stopped and other people began writing in the series, they made a joke out of it. The first twelve books depict the kids growing and aging, but then after Warner’s death, they become a bit like comic book characters: their ages are rolled back a few books, then frozen while the world changes around them. The books coming out when I grew up involved computers and the like, despite the fact that in the first book, cars aren’t a thing. Seriously, the only vehicles mentioned are horses and wagons. I did not notice that as a kid.

At some point in 1993, my mother made a decision she’d later regret. She saw a book in Food World or wherever called Let’s Get Invisible! and thought it would be a fun choice for her son who always had his nose in a book. Let’s Get Invisible was my introduction to Goosebumps, which I’m confident was The Series of the 1990s. Everyone read Goosebumps, even the jocks who would have only otherwise read baseball cards and the Spalding logo on their sports equipment: the fervour was such that my library hosted a Goosebumps fan club, complete with posters that were blown-up versions of the books. (I vividly remember the Monster Blood II cover, with an overgrown hamster….) Goosebumps was my introduction to not only the horror genre, but staples thereof: most of R.L. Stine’s premises were original to him (monster blood, Horrorland, the haunted mask), but he also incorporated horror traditions like ghosts, mummies, and demon-possessed ventriloquists’ dolls. My parents were increasingly disturbed by the covers over the years. One of the original series’ hallmarks was Stine’s love of structural suspense: each chapter ended with something like a cliffhanger, and at the end of each novel there was a twist, in which the main character has a sickening moment of realization, or the reader realizes the narrator isn’t who they thought. (In one memorable instance, we get Sixth Sense’d.) Stine quickly replaced Beverly Cleary as My Favorite Author, and I began raiding my sisters’ collection of Fear Street novels, which…er, were considerably different in content, as they involved much more murder. Fortunately I don’t remember much about those books, beyond one (Silent Night) that involved a Santa, a toy store, and one of the characters’ hatred of “Little Drummer Boy”.

Some remembered favorites:

Let’s Get Invisible! My first Goosebumps. A mirror is discovered in an attic with an attached light. When the light is turned on, anyone directly in front of the mirror is rendered invisible — leading to the usual childish antics of pranks and spying. The longer one stays invisible, though, the harder it is to come back — and the mirror has its secrets, as the main character learns when his little brother’s mirror-self attempts to trap the little brother in the mirror so that the mirror-self can escape into the real world.

One Day at Horrorland. While lost on an interminable road trip, the Morris family spots a sign for an adventure park they’ve never heard of: Horror Land. Figuring that it’ll be easier to find their way once the restless kids have been properly distracted, the dad pulls in and the fun b- oh, wait. The car just blew up. Well, that was unexpected. After that promising start, the kids go in by themselves to leave the adults to do adult things, like call the insurance company to ask “My car just randomly exploded, is that covered”. The park is not popular, and what other children Lizzie and Luke see are crying. They soon discover why: the rides here are terrifying. Not hah-hah fake scary, more like one-second-away-from-juvenile-cardiac-arrest scary. The scares continue throughout.

The Monster Blood miniseries is one I wanted to revisit, but couldn’t find any ready copies of: it involves a canned toy called Monster Blood that, if eaten, makes the eater grow enormous and go a little beserk. The Haunted Mask was somewhat similar in that the mask attached itself to the wearer and began changing their personality, I think.

The Ghost Next Door has one of my favorite twists in the entire series, and that’s all I can say.

Say Cheese and Die! Very memorable for its cover that featured skeletons bbqing. While exploring an abandoned house, the main character discovers that whenever he takes a photo of someone or something, it develops into a picture of destruction and misery: a shot of a new station wagon, for instance, develops into a shot of that station wagon crumpled from a massive car wreck. Does the camera show the future — or does it dictate it?

Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes. I can’t remember much about this book beyond it featuring lawn gnomes who came alive and did mischief, but I remember one bit of dialogue that freaked me the heck out when reading this as a kid. Do you remember the scene in Toy Story where the toys are trying to scare Sid, and it culminates in Woody doing that uncanny turning-his-head-completely-around thing and saying “…..so play nice….”? That happens here in book form, but the dialogue is — “Not funny, Joe. Not funny at all.”, and it still give me the creeps.