Word: fun
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Nightmare Room, and a new publisher, HarperCollins. Stine insists that he is not in the business of repeating himself: "I always describe Goosebumps as a roller-coaster ride, all the twists and turns and crazy things jumping out at you. I see The Nightmare Room more like a fun house. You step inside this place, and everything seems normal at first. And then you look and you see, ah, the floor is tilted. And then it looks like the walls are closing in on you...You're not in your old reality...
Roller coaster or fun house, the first two books in the new series, Don't Forget Me! and Locker 13, read like slightly more sophisticated installments of Goosebumps. Stine's prose is, as usual, simple, his dialogue attuned to the speech of the young ("awesome," "totally lost it," "Duh"). The plots of both involve Stine's trademark: teenagers being frightened witless in a context assuring readers that nothing truly dangerous will occur. As he admits, "There's more teasing than horror in my books...
...Forget Me! shows Stine's knack for unearthing and exploiting the primal emotions of childhood, in this case sibling rivalry. Danielle, 15, can't understand why her parents and friends find her pesky little brother Peter, 9, so endearing. He's always trying to horn in on her fun. When Danielle and a chum are practicing a mock-hypnotism act for a school skit, Peter--natch--insists that Danielle hypnotize him. Uh-oh. Not only does little brother go into a trance and come out of it with an alarming loss of memory, but also strange voices start emanating from...
...affordable gas and, yes, Alan Greenspan are way more important to investors than which party is in power. Yet every four years, after the Dems and the G.O.P. stake out the policy battleground at their national conventions, wags start in on how the market would fare under each candidate. Fun sport. But the Clinton years in particular stand much received wisdom on its head...
...might do to cure a muscle: "For a week I had ultrasound two or three times a day, then I'm sitting on a table with someone digging into a muscle that's already sore as hell, breaking up fluid that's in there from the trauma. Not much fun...