For more than 30 years, and over the course of some 330 books typed mostly with one now-gnarly and crooked index finger—that’s right: 330 books with one finger—R.L. Stine has been frightening and enthralling young readers all over the world. In that time, the Goosebumps series has sold hundreds of millions of copies and spawned a television series, video games, a zone in a theme park, and a movie, starring Jack Black as Stine, whose sequel will premiere in October.

On a recent dark and stormy afternoon in New York, the author—who turns 75 next month and goes by Bob in real life—showed me around his Upper West Side apartment. His office was decorated with several vintage radios, a skeleton wearing a Goosebumps cap, and a giant prop cockroach from a school production. “How many offices have a three-foot-long cockroach?” Stine asks. “I tell people it came from under the sink.”

We spoke about his accidental career, drawing on his own youthful fears, plus the appeal and importance of horror for kids already living with life’s own horrors.

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