In this episode we discussed 'The Werewolf of Fever Swamp', 'Werewolf Skin' and 'Night in Werewolf Woods' by R.L. Stine.

Download and play Adam's fantastic choose-your-own adventure Edgar Allen Poe game here!

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com.

Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, find her work at makiyamazaki.com

Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and his band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk

Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find her work at behance.net/lettydraws

Some issues with recording meant that the audio quality in this episode is worse than we hoped for. Apologies, and this should be resolved for next time.

Transcript

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray, and today we’re going to be starting our journey into Goosebumps with two books: The Werewolf of Fever Swamp and Werewolf Skin. Enjoy.

(Theme tune plays)

Ren: Hi, I’m R.L. Stine!

Adam: What? No you’re not! That’s a lie. Please don’t trick our listeners into thinking we’ve got an exclusive interview with R.L. Stine. Because we haven’t.

Ren: But he did introduce the episode, The Werewolf of Fever Swamp.

Adam: He did, with a very genial introduction, I thought.

Ren: It was pretty calm. Not very scary.

Adam: No, but I liked that, he wasn’t sensationalist about it. Have you seen much of Tales of The Unexpected?

Ren: No.

Adam: Because the early series based on Roald Dahl’s stories he introduces, and I don’t know, there’s just something a bit off about that Roald Dahl. You don’t really feel like you’re in for a comfortable viewing. There’s something, I don’t want to say smarmy because that’s not quite it, I don’t quite know what the word is.

And you know, Hitchcock was a bit of a creep obviously, but it’s not so much that but that he always seems so pleased with himself, like he’s putting on a show. A bit of a P.T. Barnam character, Hitchcock. Whereas R.L. Stine, you can tell that he’s an author. He’s not much of a performer he’s just like ‘Oh, hello, I’m R.L. Stine’.

Ren: — ‘I wrote this, it’s about werewolves’. I don’t think I ever realised he was a real person.

Adam: Like, literally until last week?

Ren: Yeah, until I watched this episode. I didn’t really ever imagine him as a man with glasses…

Adam: Rather as a force of nature.

Ren: A force of children’s horror.

Adam: Sort of impersonal….

Ren: Yeah, I don’t know. I was kind of surprised to see him in his corporeal form.

Adam: One of his corporeal forms.

I think both of these are in the original run of Goosebumps, which I think is the first 60 books. Either they’re all written by R.L. Stine, the real man, or they’re written by a team of authors. But they have an incredibly consistent writing style., right? I was quite struck, because we read as companion pieces The Werewolf of Fever Swamp which is number 14, and Werewolf Skin which is number 60.

And there’s differences between them, which we’ll discuss, but they read in a very similar style. He’s pumped out a lot of them between one and another but it still very much feels like Goosebumps and it still reads in the same way. So either they’re all the same guy, or they had a very strict in-house style.

Ren: I think maybe by the time we get to Werewolf Skin there’s a little bit of strain on the formula happening.

Adam: Yeah, I think that’s fair. Shall we say what Goosebumps is for all the people who have been living in a Goosebumps cave?

Ren: It’s just… a ubiquitous children’s horror phenomenon of the ‘90s.

Adam: Yeah, these were everywhere. If you had a school library or a library van, they were always filled with Goosebumps books.

Ren: I think I mostly got mine from the school library, because I don’t think my parents were exceptionally keen on them.

Adam: I can’t imagine there were many parents, to be fair. For different reasons, some idealogical some aesthetic, but I can’t imagine there are many parents who are like ‘Yes, my kid loves Gossebumps, this is great!’

Ren: They had these kind of awful covers that were dripping slime and bubbles and leering puppets.

Adam: We really need to delve into the ‘90s obsession with slime. Like I feel there must be deep socio-psychological reasons for why the ‘90s specifically was very into lurid coloured slime and gunge. Is it some kind of sign of late-stage capitalism? I’ll try not to intellectualise it, against all my impulses.

Ren: And the Werewolf of Fever Swamp has some slime, because it’s in a swamp, so it has bog.

Adam: What’s your cover? Is yours the original cover?

Ren: I’m reading it on the Kindle, weirdly.

Adam: Oh my word, I can’t even imagine reading Goosebumps on a Kindle. That’s bizarre.

Ren: I know, it’s because I messed up ordering the books and had to get it quickly.

Adam: You mean you didn’t have your prized complete collection of Goosebumps, who even are you?!

Ren: Oh, I must have mislaid… my three foot long —

Adam: — Your basement stacks.

Ren: I don’t know if I ever owned all that many of them.

Adam: No, I don’t know if I did. Because I think like many kids, again, I got mine from the library, Ipswich library in town, rather than the school library. Our school library had a lot of Fighting Fantasy books, I got those from the school library, but in terms of chose-your-own-adventure books and Goosebumps books I’m pretty sure I got them from the library in town.

Ren: What cover do you have?

Adam: Okay, so the cover I have is I think the original? It’s got sort of effervescent goo, it’s got a goo colour gradient going on. It’s like the most lurid power-point background slide imaginable. It’s orange at the top and then segues tastefully into pink and then rather abruptly into green, and it’s all bubbly slime gloop, and out of the middle erupts the head of the protagonist, I assume, who looks oddly like Steve from Stranger Things, the cool one with the ‘80s hair. And he’s got this ‘90s quiff going on, and then the quiff kind of merges with another head, the fur of a werewolf head, which is also poking out of the goop next to his head.

Ren: Wow, okay.

Adam: It’s pretty grotesque, and his face is making this really weird one-eyebrow raised smirk. I mean a lot of Goosebumps protagonists are quite smirky, admittedly, they’re often quite smug. But he’s trapped in Get Your Own Back style goop with a disembodied werewolf head, you’d think he looked scared but he doesn’t, he looks fine. And of course beneath that it has the ubiquitous ‘Reader Beware, You’re in for a Scare’.

Ren: Yeah, good stuff.

Adam: So do you remember reading any of them specifically as a kid?

Ren: I didn’t read either of these ones, I’m pretty sure.

Adam: No I think I read the choose-your-own-adventure werewolf one, Night in Werewolf Woods, but I don’t think I read either of these two.

Ren: The ones that I have strongest memories of are the Carnival of Horror series and I also really liked The Ghost Next Door, that was one I read a lot. I think because it wasn’t too scary.

Adam: It’s often regarded as an uncharacteristically melancholic Goosebumps.

Ren: It was quite a good one, that.

Adam: Maybe we’ll have a look at that another time.

Ren: And as I mentioned last episode, I generally avoided the ones that seemed too scary and read mostly very silly ones, like The Blob that Ate Everyone, and the chicken one.

Adam: I think I read the chicken one too. Which is just… someone gets turned into a chicken, right.

Ren: Yeah, it’s pretty awful!

Adam: Remember folks, it’s veganism January!

Ren: Yeah, they start clucking involuntarily. It’s a little bit awful, this transformation, this body horror.

Adam: One of the characters lays a big egg on the lawn. I remember reading the Monster Blood books, I think maybe Monster Blood II specifically. There’s one where you think they’ve escaped and the monster blood starts sluicing down the aisle of the aeroplane the characters are on at the end.

I remember Slappy, and I remember being scared of Slappy. And I also remember my brother, and when he was young he wouldn’t have wanted me to give out this information, he’s now in his mid twenties and he’s got over this fear, so I think it’s okay, if I don’t give his name.

He was very scared of the TV adaptation of It Came From Beneath The Sink. Which is basically about an alien that happens to look like a kitchen sponge. And this gave him, for a while, a phobia of kitchen sponges. So if the kitchen sponge was out, or under the sink, he would get very upset. An unusual phobia, but it is quite a scary episode.

I guess sponge textures are kind of strange and alien, they do come from deep beneath the sea, I guess, and lots of deep see creatures do look pretty damn weird. But I like that one in particular because the way that they defeat the sponge. The idea is that the sponge absorbs negative feelings, so it feeds of negative energy, so the more scared they got, the more they hate the sponge, the stronger it grows. So the way they win at the end is by cradling the sponge in their arms and singing it lullabies as though it were a little baby, but the sponge hates this.

Ren: Like, (tiny sponge voice) ‘Noooo! fear me!’

Adam: Yeah, (tiny sponge voice) ‘Don’t love me, fear me!’

Ren: Aww.

Adam: So it shrinks down to the size of a normal sponge and then the dog eats it, I think. But like you, I remember not reading quite a few of them because the covers scared me too much, like The Cuckoo Clock of Doom I definitely didn’t read, because it’s just a cuckoo clock but with a real cuckoo leering out of it. And I think I started Say Cheese and Die, but I don’t think I got very far. I think after I got the premise of ‘You take a photo, you see what awful things are going to happen’ that probably tied in with… hopefully most of our listeners will have watched Amelie at some point?

Ren: Presumably.

Adam: There’s a bit when Amelie’s a kid, and a camera’s given to her and the film’s been used, so it’s an empty camera and she goes around pretending to take photos of things with it, and then she takes a photo of some cars and they crash, and her neighbour very cruelly tells her that her taking the photographs caused the crash. And then she watches the news that evening and she believes that everything bad on the news was caused by her taking photographs. And I absolutely had very similar beliefs as a kid. I remember seeing, I think it was the famine in Ethiopia, and believing that I’d caused it by thinking about it, and the more I thought about, say, starvation in Ethiopia the more it would happen. So the idea of this camera that somehow condemns the subject to death by taking the photo was a very disturbing one for me.

Ren: I definitely had a sort of similar… I definitely did a lot of warding-off rituals around that kind of age when I was reading Goosebumps, so I think that idea would have definitely played into my fears as well.

Adam: I have more vivid memories of the books and the covers especially, and then some muddled memories of the TV programme. I definitely remember Slappy from the TV, who’s the evil ventriloquist dummy, because I remember that they defeat him in one of the episodes by pushing him onto his back, and he’s like ‘Lift me up! lift me up!’ and they’re like ’No, obviously not Slappy, you’re an evil homicidal dummy’ and he’s like ‘Lift me up!’ and they’re like ‘No. No we’re not’. So they just leave him. Which I thought was a quite nicely pragmatist way of defeating him.

I remember the intro scaring me quite a lot, especially when the dogs eyes flashed red or green or whatever they do. And in the intro R.L. Stine is pictured as this shadowy man in black figure with a briefcase, and as the music crescendos the briefcase opens and all the loose leaves of the Goosebumps pages blow out into the world, contaminating the landscape turning things evil. Such is the power of literature. If we’re willing to extend that term to Goosebumps, of course.

I mean, I think it’s fair to say that this is definitely… I don’t want to say the schlockiest, though that’s probably true. But this is very much aimed at kids of a certain age, and reading them as an adult has a certain nostalgia value, but if you’re an adult listening to this and have never read Goosebumps and are now like, ‘Yeah I’m going to get into Goosebumps!’, honestly I probably wouldn’t bother.

Ren: I think we’re relying quite heavily on nostalgia for this one.

Adam: Yeah. This isn’t Alaizabel Cray.

Ren: So, shall I give a little… I mean, I’ve written a summary of Werewolf of Fever Swamp, it is a summary of the whole book.

Adam: I think that’s okay. I don’t think there’s need for spoiler warnings here, really.

Ren: Okay. In The Werewolf of Fever Swamp, our protagonist Grady and his family have just moved to Florida from Vermont, because Grady’s father wishes to study the effects of the Floridian swamps on swamp deer. When Grady hears spine-chilling howls in the night, and comes across dismembered animals in the swamp, he becomes convinced that the hermit who lives in a shack in the swamp is a werewolf. Little does he know, the real werewolf is his new friend, Will, who attacks him in the woods and then disappears. The book ends with Grady as the new werewolf, joyfully howling the the swamp under the full moon.

Adam: That’s a nice description.

Ren: Not a huge amount happens in this book, but it’s quite atmospheric, I thought.

Adam: Yeah, I think the strength of the book probably comes from… it’s set in Florida, so the two kids, Grady and his sister and their parents have just moved to Florida, and I think it does get a lot out of the swamp setting. I mean R.L. Stine seems to be quite keen to stress that wolves aren’t native to Florida swamps, bear with me here. I think if anything he over-stresses it.

Ren: (hugely incredulous voice) ‘Wolves?! In Florida?!’

Adam: Yeah. There’s quite a lot of that. But he gets quite a lot of that Southern Gothic swamp setting, you get the sense of the swamp as this stinky, sucking place. Hot and humid and wet and moist.

Ren: Huge leaves.

Adam: Descriptions of the leaves and mosquitos. It’s definitely quite atmospheric, as it goes. I definitely found it more atmospheric than the suburbia of Werewolf Skin. So it doesn’t at this stage feel generic. There feels like there is some enjoyment in describing this location, which is nice. But as you said, not that much happens. Mostly what propels the book is ‘there’s definitely a werewolf, but we don’t know who it is’. But there’s a surprisingly small amount of threat.

Ren: And quite a lot of family drama.

Adam: Actually, yeah, and family drama is not something I especially associate with Goosebumps and there is quite a lot of that in Fever Swamp. And there’s a theme with the parents are rationalists, and scientists so they say ‘no, there’s no such thing as werewolves’ but you also have the local folk legends about werewolves. So you have this idea of these people coming from an urban setting, moving into this far more rural setting and this conflict of belief systems, basically. Which, I mean, it plays out. I don’t think there’s any particular commentary to be had. It’s relatively pacy, I felt that Werewolf Skin dragged to me in a way that Fever Swamp didn’t drag.

Ren: Yeah, I think Fever Swamp is the better book, definitely.

Adam: I do feel like there’s only so much you can do with werewolves though. I kind of like In the Company of Wolves, the film adaptation of some of Angela Carter’s stories, which I think we watched together?

Ren: Oh yes, we did.

Adam: Although I remember the only thing that really scared us was a big hulking humanised doll with a really flat face.

Ren: I was just about to mention that! This strange slab-faced doll.

Adam: I remember that being the only thing that really bothered us in the whole film. But I do think werewolves… basically they’re only as scary as wolves are, right, and wolves are kind of scary, there’s a threat of wolves, but when a human becomes a werewolf, generally speaking they’re just wolves. Werewolves aren’t especially intelligent, they’re just wolves. They might as well not be not be werewolves, they might as well just be wolves?

Ren: Which is why I guess a lot of werewolf things put a lot of stock in the transformation.

Adam: Yeah, because once they’re transformed they’re just going to do wolf stuff. And don’t get me wrong, if I lived out in a shack and I knew there were wolves roaming about I would be kind of scared. But that’s a fairly rational sensible fear. In fact, in many ways, werewolves are a lot less dangerous and scary than real wolves, because half of the time they’re not wolves, whereas wolves are wolves 100% of the time. So really, werewolves are 50% less scary than wolves. Unless we agree that humans are the real evil.

But it’s not like vampires. Vampires have magic abilities essentially, they’re humans with extra-scary abilities and sociopathy, and they’re really predatory. So I can see why vampires are scary. And I mean, mummies are sort of scary, I guess. They’re slow, generally speaking, but they’re rotting and contamination fears.

Ren: Werewolves are more just sad, really.

Adam: Is that a very ‘90s (backwards-cap voice) ‘werewolves are sad’?

Ren: No, I think it’s because my main werewolf exposure is Harry Potter, and Lupin’s a very sympathetic character who you just feel sorry for that he has this affliction.

Adam: Well, I wouldn’t know because being too cool for school I was too busy reading my Goosebumps books, not my (mock disgust) Harry Potter books.

Ren: Ah, okay.

Adam: There was a nice Harry Potter museum in the British Library in London which I did go to for my friend’s birthday a few months back, and that was pretty good I guess, but mostly because it had lots of alchemy stuff, alchemical scrolls.

Ren: I think this is definitely a thing. All my friends who are just a few years older than me tend to not have read Harry Potter

Adam: And then everyone who’s —

Ren: My age or younger, has read it.

Adam: It’s like, did you play Neopets?

Ren: Yes, I did yes.

Adam: Everyone your age! Everyone who is now into their late 20s but not yet 30 has played Neopets as a kid! I actually think, I’ve dated say half a dozen people, I think every one of those people has played Neopets because they were two or three years younger than me. I mean, we won’t talk about Neopets. I’m sure there are some great horror themed Neopets mini-games.

Ren: Oh yeah, I mean there’s a whole — (Ren thinks better of going doing this route) No, no, let’s not.

Adam: So let’s talk about how Fever Swamp’s adapted.

Ren: I found it fairly dull in TV form?

Adam: It’s a two-parter so it does get a bit drawn-out I think. We start with R.L. Stine’s introduction.

Ren: Yeah, I did like that. The Garth Marenghi.*

Adam: Aww, yeah it is a bit. I noticed for the first time that when the dog’s eyes flash in the introduction there’s barking on the soundtrack to the theme tune. That’s quite good. But I didn’t make that many notes on it.

Ren: No, me neither.

Adam: I’ve written ‘Scare chords!’ which is to be expected, and I liked the fact that there seemed to be a lot of dry ice going on in the swamp. I had this millennial anxiety, I spent a fair amount of time thinking ‘Is dry ice bad for the environment, I can’t remember? is it okay to pump this much dry ice into a swamp?’ which goes to show it’s not a very exciting episode, that my brain was quite taken up with this question.

Ren: One of the only things I have written down is that Grady’s friend, Will was like ‘Oh yeah, that silver bullets thing’s a myth. The werefolk invented that themselves to stop poor people hunting that’. Like, that’s pretty smart.

Adam: And that was written in, that’s not in the book. They also had quite good faces, I thought. I mean, I don’t want to insult a child actor’s face… full stop, I don’t. He just had quite an unusual face, his friend Will, slightly pug-nosed I guess, he just looks slightly unusual in a way that you think ‘huh, this is a slightly odd kid’. He’s a well-chosen actor I think, he’s quite good.

Ren: There’s a bit I really liked in the book where Will and Grady meet for the first time. They’re both 12 but then Will’s like, ‘I thought maybe you were 11, you look kind of young’ and it’s just such an accurate childhood power play.

Adam: The equivalent of the business cards in American Psycho.

Ren: (Superior child voice) ‘Oh, I thought you were 11’

Adam: Shot through the heart!

Ren: Yeah, I enjoyed that.

Adam: A serious bit of note that doesn’t happen in the book is that Grady locks his own mum in the shed saying ‘you’ll be safe in there mom! It won’t be able to get you!’. So I thought that was a nice moment of domestic horror. Because at this point his parents obviously don’t believe there are werewolves, so it seems like he’s just gone off the deep end. Weirdly, I thought that the TV adaptation of Werewolf Skin, which is far the inferior book was much better, and was actually quite well-directed. There’s all sorts of fancy camera stuff going on in Werewolf Skin, there’s crane shots, there’s contra-zooms, I was ticking them off! These directors have gone to film school!

Do you want to explain the plot of Werewolf Skin?

Ren: Well, I do have an irrelevant anecdote related to Fever Swamp.

Adam: Oh is that the time you turned into a werewolf?

Ren: You know Grady gets bitten by a snake. And it turns out he’s fine, but it reminded me of this book that I had as a kid called ‘The TV Kid’ by Betsy Byers, and it was this strange second-hand paperback I had that I never saw anywhere else. In it the main character gets bitten by a rattlesnake and it has all these hauntingly awful descriptions of his leg swelling up and turning all kinds of colours and it feeling like a sausage that was about to burst.

Adam: Urgghh.

Ren: Yeah, so it reminded me of that. Though Grady was fine.

Adam: Did that really stay with you as a kid?

Ren: Oh yeah, it was a really strange little book, and also the main character lived in a motel, and I’d never heard of a motel before reading this book because we don’t —

Adam: What’s it called again?

Ren: The TV Kid.

Adam: It’s hard to tell with this podcast because there are books that are scary for kids but that aren’t actually horror. It’s hard to know how far to stretch the formula. Especially when there are so many Goosebumps books that we are morally and contractually obliged to read. Every last one.

Ren: Yeah. So, Werewolf Skin.

In Werewolf Skin, it’s around Halloween and our protagonist Alex is staying with his Aunt and Uncle in remote Wolf Creek, a small town where the locals seem unusually interested in myths of werewolves. He’s warned to stay out of the woods at night, and to stay away from the creepy neighbours next door, but his curiosity gets the better of him. After seeing strange shapes in their house at night, Alex at first believes that it is the Marling’s who are werewolves, but is then shocked to discover that the Marling’s don’t exist, the werewolves are none other than his own Aunt and Uncle, and they are using the empty house next door to hide the werewolf skins they need to transform. Alex and his friend Hannah wear the skins on Halloween, to prevent his Aunt and Uncle transforming, and the curse is lifted. It seems like a happy ending, until it is revealed that Hannah, too, is a werewolf, and the last line of the story is her sinking her teeth into Alex’s chest.

Adam: Which isn’t particularly foregrounded. He could have got a lot of dramatic irony out of this premise, but it feels like a fairly un-signposted reveal, that Hannah’s actually a werewolf. There hasn’t been much to illustrate that she’s actually a werewolf throughout the book.

Ren: Yeah, it’s just a twist.

Adam: I think it’s one of the main weaknesses of Goosebumps, this almost obsessive need to have twists all the time. Like the amount of chapters that try to end on cliffhangers, and some of them are just rubbish.

Ren: I was going to say. I feel like it would be more readable if they didn’t try to end every chapter on a cliffhanger.

Adam: Like, the kid’s probably going to read the book anyway, you don’t need to keep forcing them to read like that!

Ren: I think my favourite rubbish cliffhanger was in Werewolf Skin where Alex gets hit on the back of the head with a bird’s nest.

Adam: Yes, that was a particularly rubbish one! I remember Rachel telling me that the one she always remembers as being particularly bad in one of the books goes ‘Oh no, there’s a monster at my door!!’ and the next chapter starts and it’s just his dog wearing a mask. His siblings put a mask on the family dog. So yeah, there are a lot of not very scary — generally the formula in Werewolf Skin is ‘Arghh, a monster’s got me! Oh no, its just a human being who’s touched me from behind’.

Ren: Yeah, or possibly a bird’s nest.

Adam: Or indeed a bird’s nest. With hands. That would be scary.

Ren: The main character spends a lot of this book being rather dense.

Adam: Gee, that’s a bit of a judgement. It’s hard when your aunt and uncle turn out to be werewolves, you know.

Ren: It just felt like he failed to pick up on the werewolf theme until fairly late.

Adam: There are a lot of characters telling him ‘Werewolves definitely exist’ even the teacher’s like ‘Yep, there are definitely werewolves here’, and he’s like ‘Pfff, werewolves’. Pretty much every authority figure, his aunt and uncle are like, he mentions werewolves and they’re like ’What? No. werewolves?! No. Brrrrrr. Don’t mention werewolves!’ and he’s like ‘Gee, I guess there aren’t any werewolves then’. But my issue mostly with the TV version was that Alex, I mean he was quite irritating in the book, but he becomes an intolerably sassy child in the TV series.

Ren: I don’t know if he was wearing a backwards cap or if I just mentally edited that on.

Adam: I don’t think he was but your brain just fills it in. For one thing, in the book at least he’s somewhat redeemed by the fact that he genuinely seems to like photography. He’s excited about taking a picture of a werewolf because this is cool and he likes going round the woods taking scary pictures. In the TV programme it’s made very obvious that he’s only interested in this so he can enter a competition to get money. And he just says ‘Yeah, this will be five hundred dollar smackeroos!’ or something. He’s foregrounded as incredibly cynical, and he doesn’t even make cutting or clever remarks, he just says things in a sarcastic voice. Like (cynical, sarcastic voice) ‘Oh yeah, I’m sure I’m going to love it living here’, ‘Great, I have to go to school in my holidays’. It’s like there’s a Kids In the Hall sketch —

Ren: — the Kids in the Hall sketch, yeah.

Adam: Where Dave Foley is stricken with this awful condition, possibly, you can’t tell, but he says he has to say everything sarcastically, but no-one knows if this is true or not because he says it sarcastically. (sarcastic voice) ‘No really, I have to say everything sarcastically’

Ren: (sarcastic voice) ‘I’m soooo lonely’

Adam: And I think poor Alex has this condition too. There was some nice ‘90s hard rock on the sound track though. The bit where his uncle drives too fast you get some real rocking out on the soundtrack, there’s even a bit where he takes a photo of some garden gnomes to ‘90s hard rock music, so that’s pretty extreme.

Ren: I related to his city kid fascination with nature.

Adam: Well, I’m not a city kid, I’m a nature kid. Well, a village kid.

Ren: He’s like ‘I’m a city kid, I seldom ever get to touch a tree’. It reminded me of when I used to come and visit you. Nature!

Adam: My friend Lily also comes from London, and when she visited the bus stop’s off the main road and then you have to walk into the village, obviously. And she’s just like ‘It’s so - I didn’t realise it’s so, it really is out in the countryside!’ and I’m like, ‘Yes, I guess’. ‘It’s really dark!’ I was like, ‘Yes, it’s the country, there’s no streetlights, it’s a country lane’. She’s like ‘Woaahhh!’. I guess I can’t relate to that.

Ren: This is me whenever I go to somewhere vaguely countryside. ‘There’s sheep! woah!’

Adam: Whenever you go somewhere that isn’t London. You London media types, talking down to us rural folk. You’re like Charlie Brooker.

Ren: I mean, I live in Glasgow. But I guess I’m still a London media type at heart.

Adam: I’m sure that’s what the tabloid press would call you. I don’t know, I liked that the programme got more mileage out of the horror of the disembodied werewolf skins than the book.

Ren: Oh yeah, it did really well! Because it’s slightly different in the TV show, he tries to bury them in a grave, but they start writhing around and transforming in the bin bag, and trying to burst out. That was pretty great.

Adam: Yeah that was my favourite. I’ve written ‘stinky werewolf skins!’ and then a dash, ‘in a bag!!’ and then my next note is ‘they exploded!!!’

Ren: They did!

Adam: They did explode. I don’t really know how. The full moon hit them and then they did explode.

Ren: So there’s this bit of werewolf lore that Werewolf Skin is named after that they have to hide their wolf skins during the day and then retrieve them at night to transform, which is apparently an older myth about werewolves. I’d never heard that particular framing before.

Adam: R.L. Stine does do his research!

Ren: Apparently. Which means that their transformation is actually pretty cool, as they put on these skins as capes, and the capes start to move and curl around their bodies.

Adam: And start to kind of merge with their flesh. Like shrink-wrapping almost. And the Werewolf Skin idea did inform a scary dream you had the other day, right?

Ren: Yeah, I’d just started reading the book, I hadn’t even got to the werewolf bit, I think it was just the title Werewolf Skin. But I had this dream that was possibly Alaizabel Cray inspired that I was with a group of people in this dark run-down house and we had torches, and we’re looking for something and I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. And it was a werewolf skin sort of flopping and slithering along the floor, kind of like a flounder on the ocean floor, and then it slithered up a wall.

Adam: Yeah, sounds pretty creepy! I had a dream last night that my best friend was using sex magic to access a dark portal into another realm and I was really annoyed at him. I was like (ticked-off voice) ‘God, don’t do that! that’s a really bad idea’.

But I think the enjoyment of both these books pales in comparison to Give Yourself Goosebumps, which I really think is the optimal form that Goosebumps should be in.

Ren: It’s very good, yeah.

Adam: I think that turning the Goosebumps second person and changing the book to a choose-you-own-adventure format, for some reason immediately lifts the quality of the Goosebumps reading experience and makes it a lot more enjoyable.

Ren: It’s because you have built-in cliffhangers, you know? You have to turn to a page.

Adam: That’s a really good point. It naturalises somehow, the cliffhangers.

Ren: It’s part of the experience.

Adam: I think it’s also that R.L. Stine’s writing style often relies on a lot of adjectives and onomatopoeia, so there’s lots of ‘Sploooshhh!’ or ‘Bang!’ and these sort of sound effects that seem a bit cheesy in a non choose-your-own-adventure book, but when it’s second person and it’s going for that visceral immediacy, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Ren: I admit that I didn’t play the whole book. But —

Adam: I hope that at least every time you got to a bad ending you restarted again from the start, re-reading every single word, as you are absolutely morally obliged to do.

Ren: Uhhh, yeah, of course I did.

Adam: Because what kind of monster would read a choose-your-own-adventure book in any other way

Ren: — And keep one finger in the last choice, I don’t know.

Adam: Urgghh! I honestly felt a little swell of anxiety in my chest at that. Now that’s a childhood hang-up. This time round I was able to do it, but as a kid no. I had way too much guilt to do that.

Ren: So I got to use my knowledge of Fever Swamp in Night in Werewolf Woods.

Adam: You’re being rewarded for your purchase power!

Ren: Yeah, they had a factoid about Fever Swamp that I definitely wouldn’t have remembered if I hadn’t literally just read it that helped me survive at least for a few more pages.

Adam: Awesome, do you want to let people know what that is?

Ren: It’s like, which bird was killed in the swamp in Fever Swamp, was it a heron or a cardinal? It was a heron.

Adam: A heron, ah. Nice. I like that a pterodactyl somehow turns up, did you get to that?

Ren: I did, yes! That was my main note. That I fell down a bottomless pit that had a pterodactyl in it. Which was great.

Adam: That’s definitely the way to keep up the kids interest in reading, just throw in a random dinosaur, whatever.

Ren: And then I met a demonic elevator operator.

Adam: It’s like the choose-your-own-adventure form takes Goosebumps worst excesses to the max, but then kind of makes them better, because it’s in the choose-your-own-adventure format. The plot doesn’t really make any sense, it’s just stuff happening. (Voice like a kid telling you their dream) ‘And then there was a dinosaur, and then there was an evil elevator operation and then there were scary werewolves and they drooled on me and then I got drool on my face and it was gross and disgusting’

Ren: And then it was all a dream! In one ending I had.

Adam: My favourite ending is you turn into a lantern. There’s lantern’s hanging over - so this book is called Night in Werewolf Woods and Woods World where the book is set is a campsite basically, and the entrance to Woods World are some paper lanterns hanging over -

Ren: Ohhhhhh

Adam: And in one of the endings somehow your consciousness and bodily form shift, and you end up becoming a paper lantern stuck over the entrance.

Ren: Ahhh I remember that! I don’t remember anything else of this book, but I remember turning into a paper lantern so I definitely read it.

Adam: I think that’s the best ending. That’s the real happy ending, getting to be a paper lantern. That’s the meditative enlightened state. And the book has this nice theme of — I mentioned that some Goosebumps protagonists are wise-asses really, they make a lot of snarky comments and the ‘you’ of Night in Werewolf Woods is no different.

He starts off making lots of snarky comments about the fact that he’s going to have to spend a week with this nerdy boy he doesn’t really like, the child of family friends. And the whole book, if you get to the good end you end up becoming quite close and standing up for him and realising that nerdiness isn’t something to be ashamed off.

And in fact one of the choices you have to make to win the book is to feed the bullies who bullied your friend to the werewolf. I assumed on first reading that the thing you would have to do is not feed them to the werewolves, but no! To win you have to say ‘No, let them be eaten’. They get out of it anyway, but that’s the right decision.

So the idea is that your friend his box of pewter figurines has been stolen, nice velvet-lined box with something like Warhammer figurines is stolen by these bullies and you have to trek out at night to find these figurines and rescue them, and take them back from the werewolves. Who have stolen the figurines? which seems a bit odd. I guess werewolves like Warhammer too. Presumably they play as… I was going to say chaos but maybe there is a werewolf…? I don’t know, I’m getting onto dodgy territory trying to talk about Warhammer because I don’t know my stuff. I’m sure there’s someone listening right now who’s clenching their teeth. There’s a lot of Warhammer books, I know that, so you’ve got to be careful about your Warhammer lore. But anyway, these figurines are stolen by the werewolves for some reason, who write a rhyme about it.

Which I think I’ve remembered off by heart. Which I didn’t try to, I should add, I didn’t prepare for this episode by learning it but I think it’s something like:

The werewolves of Woods World They love to see red So the box that was yours Is now their box instead

The werewolves of Woods World Disappear at dawn So you have to find the box Before the night is… gorn.

Ren: I mean, they’re wolves so.

Adam: They’re wolves, they’re not poets. They’re not William… Wolves-worth.

Ren: Mmm. (long pause)

Adam: That’s the only wolf pun…. as we were saying there aren’t many famous wolf poets.

Ren: Exactly. Speaking of Fighting Fantasy, by the way, Maki recently brought a couple of them for us to play together. Including House of Hell which definitely comes under our remit.

Adam: House of Hell is brutally hard. Have you completed it?

Ren: No.

Adam: I’m not wholly convinced that it’s completable. I spent many an hour attempting House of Hell. I’m not sure… I want to trust Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, but House of Hell, I’m not sure. House of Hell is very much for teens, that one. It’s got human sacrifice.

Ren: We were! We were human sacrificed.

Adam: And there was a half-naked lady!

Ren: Gosh.

Adam: There’s some teen rated content in that one. I liked some of the later Fighting Fantasy books where they got really weird and experimental and way too ambitious basically and tried to integrate spells and things. There’s some where you go through different astral realms and things. But particularly Goosebumps choose-your-own-adventure books had a big impact on me. I made my own (product placement) Evermore, an Edgar Allen Poe choose-your-own game you can play online in twine.

Ren: Yeah, I’ll put a link to it in the show notes.

Adam: Is that alright?

Ren: It’s definitely alright.

Adam: I mean, not many people have played it, and I did spend hundreds of hours making it.

Ren: And it’s very good.

Adam: Oh thanks! That’s an Edgar Allen Poe themed, massive, it really is very big… well basically you and me, not you the listener, me and Ren, Ren and I, came up with the idea of doing this big choose-your-own-adventure twine game based on Edgar Allen Poe’s book.

And this was a great idea, I really enjoyed doing it, but I didn’t realise quite how many stories Edgar Allen Poe had written. And how many of them aren’t really horror stories, how many of them are rubbish comedy stories that might have been funny to some Victorian maybe, but even then, are not really very funny. But because I’m so perfectionist, I had to include all of them as well. So I think it includes maybe all but 3 of Poe’s 100 or so stories. It’s pretty big.

Ren: I need to play some more. I have played an amount of it, but I’m sure there’s a lot more.

Adam: My coding got better and more ambitious as it went on, so the further you get into the game the more interesting it gets because I was able to do a lot more with the HTML and start using CSS more. So if you want the really cool hypertext effects. And if you want some cool Ascii art.

Ren: Ah, I do.

Adam: Anyway, Goosebumps, if you’ve never read them you could pick up one of the choose-your-own-adventure readers beware Give Yourself Goosebumps books, they are a lot of fun. But from the ones we looked at today I wouldn’t bother, but maybe if we look at ones in the future like The Ghost Next Door maybe we can re-appraise and more thoroughly recommend them. I would say Werewolf of Fever Swamp and Werewolf Skin are probably for collectors only, or really best read for nostalgia purposes.

Ren: Or possibly if you’re a child.

Adam: True, if you’re a child! Er, hello child, I’m glad you’re listening to our podcast. I’m not very good with kids.

Ren: Cool. Do you have a Goosebumps appropriate sign-off for us?

Adam: I guess, ‘Listener beware, you’ve just had a scare!’ or you’ve just had a lot of ‘90s references that scared you because you didn’t get them.

Ren: Yeah! Our intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, our outro music is by Joe Kelly, and our artwork is by Letty Wilson. If you liked this episode and fancy it, review us on Itunes, and we’re on twitter at @stillscaredpod. See you next time!

(outro music plays)

• Obligitary British comedy reference for this episode.