THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 29, 1995 TAG: 9510270729
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
Not Frankenstein but R.L. Stine seems to reign supreme this season.
Stine's the Halloween hipster who has sold 90 million copies of his horror novels internationally to teens and preteens with his short, creepy ``Fear Street'' and ``Goosebumps'' paperback series.
Like the ``Baby-sitters Club'' books, which young girls read, they're packaged and marketed monthly like so many colorful boxes of breakfast cereal, but with this difference: Young girls AND boys read them. Statistically, it's harder to get young boys to read anything. So we owe R.L. (for Robert Lawrence) Stine, whose output has been prodigious, a rousing huzzah.
His output averages two short books a month, with happy-go-yucky titles like Welcome to Dead House, Let's Get Invisible and Say Cheese and Die. Yes, they're fast. Yes, they're flip and facile.
Fine.
But now the 52-year-old Manhattanite is being repackaged for adults. Producer Brandon Tartikoff calls him up with a proposal for an instant best seller. Warner Books puts up a reported $1 million advance and Miramax purchases the film rights.
Then Stine sits down to write the book.
Maybe it isn't so easy to prefabricate a mega-multimedia property after all.
The result, Superstitious (Warner Books, $21.95, 390 pp.), is being touted by its publisher as ``unrelentingly scary'' in the ``tradition of Rosemary's Baby and the best of Stephen King.''
Well, we won't quibble about a ``tradition'' that is barely 28 years old. But the fact remains that Superstitious is less scary than flat repulsive. Here's a victim confronted by the ghoul du jour:
What is that tearing sound?
The searing pain shoots down her shoulders, down her back. Her legs give way. She collapses to her knees.
She knows her scalp has been torn away. Her scalp and all her hair. Ripped off her head. One effortless swipe.
No!
Yes.
There's more.
The fingers stab deep.
Her eyeballs make a soft plop plop as they are pried out.
These passages occur on page 7. As my daughter, a fan of ``Goosebumps,'' might contend: Oh, gross. And there's so much more to look forward to.
The plot: Breathless but attractive graduate student Sara Morgan falls for academic but attractive professor Liam O'Connor at fictive Moore State College in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile a serial killer is loose, making grunting noises and strewing moist giblets all over the campus. Could obsessively superstitious Liam be connected in some way?
Does Dracula floss?
What is missing in the author's single-minded attempt to reach an ``adult'' audience is the charm, wit and reticence he applies to his better writings for children. Instead, Stine crams in the obligatory sex, violence and gore like a dutiful chef supplying a cafeteria crowd with the ketchupy meatloaf it has come to expect. The consequence is scary, all right, but not in the way the author intended.
The cover of Superstitious announces the volume as ``the stunning adult fiction debut of bestselling author R. L. Stine.''
One is stunned, for sure. This volume has already been picked up as a Main Selection of the Doubleday Book Club and a Special Release of the Literary Guild.
Boo.
- MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
R.L. Stine's latest book is ``Superstitious.''
by CNB