COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Author R.L. Stine has been making children laugh and cry with his spooky and often funny children’s books for the last 33 years.
The Columbus-area native was back in his hometown Thursday, met by a crowd and a special honor.
The Leveque Tower looked like it was dripping with green slime, and Columbus City Hall was also bathed in green light in honor of Stine, back in his hometown to unveil the scariest street that now bears his name.
“Everything’s a surprise to me,” he said. “I think no one’s more amazed by all this than I am.”
Grant Avenue in the Italian Village is now known as R.L. Stine Way. Robert Lawrence Stine grew up in a small house in Bexley.
“When I write these books, I think back to my time in Bexley and what it looked like, and so a lot of the settings are pretty much what I remember from here in the books,” he said.
Stine was nine years old when he started writing using an old typewriter.
“I was this weird kid in my room typing all the time, typing, and my mother would stand outside my door and she would say, ‘What’s wrong with you? Go outside and play. What’s wrong with you? Get out! Stop typing. Go outside.’ Worst advice I ever got,” Stine said.
He’s now sold more than 400 million books worldwide, mostly through the Goosebumps series, spooking children with ghouls, ghosts, and every monster imaginable.
Watch NBC4’s full interview with R.L. Stine in the video player below.
“I never planned to be scary,” he said. “I always just wanted to be funny. I wrote joke books and I did a lot of funny books for kids.”
Stine said it was an editor who advised him to follow the horror route, which just caught on.
“When you, when you sneak up behind somebody and you go, ‘Boo,’ what’s the first thing they do?” he said. “They gasp and then they laugh. It’s the same visceral reaction, I think.”
One of his biggest fans, Owen Lee, 9, came from about an hour away to meet the author.
“I like a good horror book, but then I love how they have the twists at the end that are just outright hilarious,” Owen Lee said.
He even had a Goosebumps-themed seventh birthday and waited three hours in the cold to meet his favorite author last year.
“Reading is a big part of our family,” Owen’s mother Sarah Lee said. “It’s something that’s really important to me as a parent to pass on to my kids and the Goosebumps in particular.”
Owen and hundreds of other fans wore their Goosebumps t-shirts and packed into the Coumbus Metropolitan Library to see the man who wrote all the stories they love.
“He’s published all these books and all these great books, and he’s just really my hero,” Owen Lee said.
There are events continuing through the month to honor Stine and his legacy of children’s literature.
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