Have you ever read R.L. Stine's Goosebumps?
Stories like The Haunted Mask, Night of the Living Dummy, Monster Blood.
It's been well over a decade since I've read a Goosebumps book.
I remember enjoying them.
Some of them...
But the plotlines have escaped me over the years.
The book's covers, though...
Those have been seared into my memory for life.
Painted throughout the 1990s by Tim Jacobus, the original Goosebumps covers masterfully
balance frightening imagery with child-like wonder.
Says Jacobus, "My style is a bit cartoonish and not ultra-realistic.
That takes the "edge" off right from the start... and never any red blood."
Instead, Jacobus gives us converse shoes, vibrant checkered tiles, and warped perspectives.
Culminating in a style that I terrifyingly loved as a kid, and can now appreciate as
an adult.
So it's no surprise that I was drawn to the 2021 book, The Art of Goosebumps.
It's a behind-the-scenes look into the series' iconic covers.
I'm not sponsored by the book, just fascinated seeing rough drafts and alternate versions
of these paintings.
Like, The Barking Ghost originally had red blood dripping from its mouth, breaking one
of Jacobus' own rules.
And, less gruesome, but you'd never know book 26 has a towel on the sink because the book's
red slime border covers it up.
As I flipped through the Art of Goosebumps, I learned some deep-cut trivia.
But I did not anticipate the rabbit hole I'd fall down on page 194.
This is a Goosebumps cover alright.
But not one I'd ever seen before.
My elementary school didn't have the book.
Nor did my local library.
Nobody had the book.
Because The Incredible Shrinking Fifth Grader... was...
Unpublished!
Welcome to a tale of lawsuits and lost books.
These are the Goosebumps stories that we never got to read.
To understand the context surrounding these missing Goosebumps books is to understand
Stine and his work ethic.
"Hello!"
Born 1943 in Columbus, Ohio, Robert Lawrence Stine is often called the Stephen King of
children's horror.
His 400 books have sold over 400 million copies worldwide.
Sales second only to Harry Potter.
But, long before goosebumps, there were giggles.
For 30 years, Stine wrote almost exclusively humor magazines and joke books under the name
Jovial Bob.
He'd experiment with horror fiction here and there, but he wouldn't commit to scares until
his 1986 teen horror novel, Blind Date.
"I told myself, forget the funny stuff.
Kids like to be scared!"
Transitioning to the horror genre saw great success for Stine.
And greater success for his book packager, Parachute Press, the company that his wife,
Jane Waldhorn, co-found just a few years prior.
Parachute struck gold in 1989 when they began creating Stine's Fear Street series, one of
the best-selling young adult series in history.
High off success, it wasn't long before Parachute encouraged Stine to write scary stories for
an untapped market...
... 8 to 12-year-olds.
Hesitant at first, Stine wrote what he knew: blending the scary elements of Fear Street
with the comedy of Jovial Bob.
The result was humor-tinged horror: Goosebumps.
A name Stine pulled from an ad he found in a TV Guide.
"We'll call it--" "We'll call it Channel 11."
"That's a horrible joke."
Scholastic, the book publisher that formerly employed Stine, contracted Stine to write
four Goosebumps books.
With more to come, should the series see success.
It wouldn't.
At least, not at first.
Goosebumps debuted to little fanfare in the summer of '92.
And the series was almost canceled at book six, Let's Get Invisible.
For reasons that to this day Stine does not know, Goosebumps would explode in popularity
going into the summer of '93.
As book sales increased tremendously, so too did Stine's workload.
By book 9, Welcome to Camp Nightmare, Stine was contractually writing at least one Goosebumps
a month.
He'd maintain this schedule for 8 years.
The original Goosebumps series would span 62 books.
The darker and scarier follow-up, Series 2000, 25 books.
And the various spin-off series would accumulate over 50 books.
At its peak in the mid-90s, the franchise was selling 4 million books a month, responsible
for 15% of Scholastic's annual revenue.
Stine was able to meet this demand due to his ability to write a single Goosebumps novel,
around 120 pages, in just under 10 days.
Or so the story goes...
Much like book 19, Stine would soon find himself...
... in Deep Trouble.
"This is kinda relaxing."
On February 1, 1999, Scholastic filed a lawsuit against Parachute.
The suit alleged that Stine breached his contract, hiring ghostwriters to write many of the,
then 100-plus, Goosebumps books.
This would have violated Stine's agreement that he'd be the sole writer of every main
series book.
a.k.a.
the original series and Series 2000.
Scholastic said yes, Stine was the sole author of Books 1 through Book 16.
But starting with book 17, Why I'm Afraid of Bees, Stine allegedly began employing freelance
writers.
These nameless authors, according to Scholastic, were making the majority of creative decisions
in the Goosebumps books.
A catalyst of the series' declining popularity, which was now selling a comparatively low
200,000 copies a month.
*cough* Stine refuted using ghostwriters, claiming
that freelancers would, at most, create detailed outlines for his books.
Footnote: in the years following the lawsuit, several Goosebumps ghostwriters would actually
reveal themselves.
Though, they are linked to spinoff books outside the main series.
So, well within the terms of Stine's contract.
Back in '99, tensions between Parachute and Scholastic were at an all-time high.
The two spent the latter half of the 90s playing tug-of-war over Goosebumps.
See, both companies owned only certain aspects of the franchise.
And Parachute felt they got the short end of the stick, unable to capitalize off the
franchise's success.
Parachute responded to the ghostwriter lawsuit with a suit of their own.
Seeking from Scholastic over $36 million in financial reparation.
As these court battles played out, Stine's contract with Scholastic expired and was not
renewed for the new millennium.
Meaning only one Goosebumps Series 2000 book...
... was actually published in 2000.
Business deals, such as a planned movie directed by Tim Burton, came to a halt, and all upcoming
books were canceled.
"It won't be long before Goosebumps books disappear."
When it comes to lost literature, Goosebumps is a unique case.
Thanks to its fast-paced, monthly release schedule, each piece of cover art was created
while its respective book was still being written.
Artists were only given a short description to go off.
Sometimes, the story would be completed before the art.
Such was the case with A Night in Terror Tower.
A tight deadline required Jacobus to crunch, creating the cover in a 30-hour painting marathon.
Other times, the art would be completed before the story.
The barbeque scene depicted on the cover of Say Cheese and Die was not originally in the
book.
It was just a scene Jacobus conjured up.
Per last-minute demands from Scholastic, Stine shoehorned the skeleton barbeque into the
book.
Though, as a dream sequence.
It's because of this relationship, between the stories and covers, that we get insight
into the unpublished Goosebumps books.
Prior to Stine's departure from Scholastic, in the late 90s, Jacobus painted Lefty, Righty,
and Slim, the three-headed Goosebumps mascot riding in a car.
The illustration's linked to a canceled book in the shortest-lived Goosebumps series.
Triple Header: a three-stories-in-one-type book.
Only two Triple Header books made it to publication, with the third being canned due to Stine's
contract expiring.
Though, he did start writing the book.
Per, an interview with Goosebumps fansite, The Bumps.
The Bumps is its own mini rabbit hole.
It was operated in the late 90s by an 11-year-old Brian Stelter, CNN's chief media correspondent.
And a 12-year-old Blake Ross, the co-creator of Mozilla Firefox.
"Whooooa" A second unused cover, this one illustrated
by Craig White, was for the canceled forty-third entry in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series.
This choose-your-own-adventure line of books also came to an abrupt end due to the Scholastic
fallout.
The plot and title of book 43 are lost to time.
Though given the monster penguins and pixellated mountains, fans believe it may have involved
an Antarctica-based virtual reality game.
One unpublished book that is not shrouded in mystery, however, is The Incredible Shrinking
Fifth Grader.
This novel would have been the 26th in Goosebumps Series 2000, had it made it to print.
While it's unclear exactly how much of The Incredible Shrinking Fifth Grader Stine actually
wrote, he would repurpose the story for his standalone 2001 novel, The Adventures of Shrinkman.
This version of the story retains the scene depicted on the original cover, where the
fifth-grade protagonist gets attacked by a white lab rat.
So, book 26 lived on!
But here's the thing.
Goosebumps Series 2000 was supposed to be forty books.
That leaves 14 more unaccounted.
Some readers have speculated that a few more of Stine's standalone novels were originally
Goosebumps books, but there is little evidence backing up these claims.
The most we know, with relative certainty, comes from this snippet in The Art of Goosebumps,
stating that book 27 was to be titled "When The Snake Bites".
Though no artwork or story was created.
It sounds almost backwards that the name exists, yet no story.
But that's just how Stine works.
He comes up with an interesting title, then writes the book.
"For me, it's really important.
I get the title first.
If I have a story and no title, I throw it out."
For example, Stine sat on the title "Brain Juice" for over a year and a half, unable
to think of a plot.
The eventual story would end up becoming one of his, and his marketing team's, personal
favorites.
More on that in a bit.
Three known titles that Stine never thought of plots for are:
The Good, The Bad, And the Very Itchy, Feeding Frenzy,
and 43 Freakout Street.
But, titles without stories are a dime a dozen.
Enter: "Slime Doesn't Pay".
Slime Doesn't Pay was the winning title of Stine's 1994 "Name a Goosebumps Book" contest.
The contest, as the name suggests, gave grade-school fans the opportunity to name Stine's next
book.
Over 1,600 titles were submitted by children across the US.
On Halloween of that year, Scholastic and America Online hosted a Live Chat with R.L.
Stine.
There, the author answered curated questions submitted by students, and announced the contest
results.
Winning the contest was Slime Doesn't Pay, imagined by 11-year-old Jimmy S, of Glencoe,
Illinois.
Good stuff!
Goosebumps, with just a dash of Bailey School Kids.
Jimmy beat titles such as: Scream Cheese,
Frog's Breath Can Kill You, and "The Grim Reaper Lives in my Locker".
Within a week, The Chicago Tribune reported that Slime Doesn't Pay was set to adorn the
cover of Stine's next book.
It never happened.
There is no Goosebumps book called "Slime Doesn't Pay".
In an alternate universe where Stine actually wrote the book in late '94, it would've been
on store shelves in the Summer of '95.
That puts it somewhere between The Barking Ghost and A Shocker on Shock Street in the
original series timeline.
Nearly 20 years later, Stine hosted a Reddit "Ask Me Anything".
There, Jimmy S's brother asked Stine why the book never released.
Unfortunately, the question went unanswered, and it's unknown how much of the story, if
any, was written.
A few years after Stine Didn't Pay... ... in the fall of '98, a second name-a-Goosebumps
contest was held.
This time around, Parachute and General Mills partnered up to sponsor the "Brain Juice Terrifying
Title Contest".
The premise was similar to the first: submit a scary, original Goosebumps book title and
Stine might just turn it into a story.
To ensure this one would, ya know, get written, Stine promised to visit the contest winner's
school and write the story in-person.
The catchy being, it would be a short story.
Not a full-fledged novel.
Cue thousands of submissions, all competing for Stine's attention.
Some maybe a little too much.
Stine's favorite would come from Braden G, a 10-year-old aspiring author in Lacona, Iowa.
Braden would be declared the winner in October '98 with his, honestly great, title: Dead
Dogs Still Fetch.
Stine headed from New York City to Braden's small town, and collaborated with the children
to write the story.
The specifics of the finished story are lost to time, though small details remain thanks
to an Iowa newspaper.
We know it featured two kids, a skeleton, a skull, and a dog that liked to play fetch
inside a graveyard.
So uh, guess what?
While I was editing this very section of the video, Dead Dogs Still Fetch was found.
PointHorror.com worked with Braden G in tracking down the story.
And best of all, it survives not through text, but through video.
"First we need two kids' names."
"Braden and Jessica have a black lab."
"What's the dog's name?
We need a good name for the dog."
"Seth?
For a dog?!"
"No, the dog's name is Seth."
"I have to pee."
"That's the end of chapter four.
Chapter five."
"Because Seth is a dead dog."
"But see, dead dogs still fetch."
"We did it!"
I've linked both PointHorror's recap of the story, and the footage, in the description.
Dead Dogs Still Fetch joins other obscure Goosebumps literature that's surfaced.
Like, a Goosebumps story exclusive to TV Guide.
We've come full circle.
And an unproduced Welcome to Dead House screenplay, written sometime in the mid-to-late-90s by
Night of the Living Dead creator, George A. Romero.
That could've been a thing!
Around the same time the screenplay was written, Goosebumps would see another unpublished book.
This one being a part of the Goosebumps Presents series.
These were books based on episodes of the Goosebumps TV series.
So, books, based on a show, based... on... books.
Advertised on the back cover of the 18th book, Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes, was the 19th book,
The Blob That Ate Everyone.
Though, it never got finished.
But not because of the lawsuit!
Rather, Stine suggesting his, and/or his alleged ghostwriters' time, was spent better elsewhere.
Like hosting yet another help-Stine-write-a-Goosebumps-book contest.
But worry not, this resulted in the very-much-published "I Am Your Evil Twin".
With only one-third of episodes getting a companion book, Goosebumps Presents came to
an early end.
Speaking of endings, I've saved the best for last.
Following Stine and Scholastic's breakup, Goosebumps needed a new home.
Answering the call: HarperCollins Children's Books.
A familiar face that published Stine's 1999 short story collection: Nightmare Hour.
In a HarperCollins press release dated January 2000, Stine's next project was announced.
"Goosebumps Gold is planned as a limited series of 12 books for a new generation of Goosebumps
fans."
Stine told Newsweek, "Somehow, I still have a few more stories to tell".
An extensive marketing campaign, dubbed the "Year of Horror", would have Stine host live
chats, discuss stories in progress, and provide fans the opportunity to star in future books.
Exciting stuff!
They even got Jacobus on board.
Returning not only as cover artist, but given the monstrous task of reinventing the Goosebumps
logo.
Designed in 1991 by Scholastic graphic designer, Hollie Rubin, the classic, slime-y logo saw
little change for a decade.
But now with Scholastic out of the picture, a new design would not only signify a new
era of the franchise, but was legally required.
In the early months of 2000, Jacobus unveiled the Goosebumps Gold logo on his personal website.
Alongside two pieces of cover art.
The Haunted Mask Lives!
And Happy Holidays from Dead House.
With Slappy New Year being announced as the third Goosebumps Gold book.
An initial release date of Halloween 2000 was set.
And things were looking good.
Goosebumps didn't need Scholastic!
Sequels to some of Stine's most iconic titles would almost certainly see Goosebumps Gold
come out of the gate swinging.
Goosebumps Gold was in Deep Trouble...
II
October 2000 came and went.
No books.
Confused, Jacobus updated his website, changing Gold's release date to a vague "2001".
Months pass, and still no books.
"Late 2001", fan sites guess.
[crickets] Jacobus and company were holding out hope,
expecting the series to release eventually.
But unbeknownst to them, Goosebumps Gold was silently canceled early into production.
Though not before all 12 books were given International Standard Book Numbers, ISBNs.
Meaning we're able to peek at official Amazon listings for some of the Gold books.
But, obviously, trying to purchase is impossible.
As it would come to light that no Goosebumps Gold stories made it past the outline stage.
While it's unknown exactly why the series was scrapped, conversations tend towards licensing
issues.
A shiny new logo may not have been enough.
There's also the possibility that Stine and HarperCollins were simply too busy with a
different project.
The Nightmare Room: a book and TV show anthology horror series.
Stine held onto that Slappy New Year title for 9 years, finally using it for an unrelated
November 2010 book.
And The Haunted Mask Lives, according to a Tweet by Stine, became his 2008 novel, The
Scream of the Haunted Mask.
In 2018, the original mockup book cover surfaced on eBay.
Signed by both Jacobus and Stine, this is the only known physical piece of Goosebumps
Gold in existence.
Sadly, Happy Holidays from Dead House, and the remaining 9 unnamed books, would never
be heard from again.
Goosebumps would return to Scholastic after a $10 million buyout in 2003, putting the
years-long legal battle to rest.
Stine would continue the series with Goosebumps Horrorland in 2008.
A serialized set of 19 books taking place inside Horror Land, the theme park run by
fan-favorite creatures.
After that was Hall of Horrors in 2011.
And Most Wanted a year later.
Slappy World is Stine's latest Goosebumps book series.
It follows Slappy the Dummy, telling scary stories, occasionally interrupting with his
own commentary.
Goosebumps is still alive, decades after Welcome to Dead House.
While the franchise may never match its success of the 90s, it's great that Stine is still
inspiring and scaring a new generation of children.
"Dear R.L.
Stine, you are my second-favorite author."
"That was the whole letter.
That was it."
Jacobus and Stine still collaborate.
Movies have been made.
A new TV series is in development.
And the Goosebumps Community is bustling.
Seriously, the wiki is one of the most comprehensive I've ever seen.
It's a resource so good that The Art of Goosebumps book...
lifted verbatim from it.
But hey, I'm just here to talk about some obscure parts of Goosebumps' history.
If you're interested in more Goosebumps rabbit holes, the lost stories are just the tip of
the iceberg.
Don't even get me started on all the mysteries surrounding the TV series.
This video was made possible thanks to Goosebumps franchise historians.
And the Scholastic Book Fair.
The best event to come to grade school since Giant Parachute Day.