Some people prefer Pepsi to Coke. Some go to Burger King instead of McDonald's. And there are those who, in the 90's, thought Sega was better than Nintendo. I'm one of these people, and I can confirm that we're horrible freaks who should be on some government watch list. But here's another one for you: The Shivers books versus the Goosebumps books.
In case you didn't know about the Shivers series (and I don't blame you, because they were objectively crap), they were horror books aimed at children. Released in 1996, at the height of Goosebumps' popularity, the Shivers books were an obvious rip-off of that venerable series. I think you need to see me after class, M.D. Spenser. Still, children's horror is an underserved market and there was more than enough room in the Nineties for both series to co-exist. Which is like having to share your toys with the little sister you never asked for, admittedly.
Shivers did have one thing going for it that Goosebumps never did: it captured the sleaze of the late-night horror movie. The cover art was always this done in this pulpy style which featured corpses, gore, grungy monsters, and scary murderers. Just look at the image above, that shit would never have flown in Goosebumps for fuck's sake. No one ever got hacked to pieces in Goosebumps. It's like a thrash metal album cover.
Grisly violence would have been far too beastly for its middle-class suburban kid protagonists. Instead the Goosebumps kids just had to contend with annoying sentient dummies, unscrupulous theme-park owning demons, seedy authority figures, and the burdening knowledge that even if they do survive, they're only going to grow up to become as boring and joyless as their parents.
This isn't to detract from Goosebumps, which no doubt instilled a life-long interest for horror into the hearts of many. But Goosebumps was missing the grunge and sleaze which Shivers provided in spades. People often died as a result of whatever the book's evil was - not necessarily 'on-camera' as it were, but Spenser rarely spared his efforts on the collateral damage. In fact, many of the books had a plot which came about because, as Taggart would say, there'd been a murder.
Let's examine the core concepts of some of the (36) Shivers books: a wax museum which turns real people in sculptures (Weirdo Waldo's Wax Museum), a mountain troll which eats children and then later stalks the kid who defeated it (Terror on Troll Mountain, Shriek Home Chicago); a bullied kid who has a curse that causes his bullies to die in horrible circumstances (The Curse of the New Kid), a theme park ripped straight from Seventies' dystopian sci-fi cinema (Lost in Dreamland); a farm in which the put-upon animals rise up and overthrow their masters in an orgy of violence (The Animal Rebellion), a kid who believes he has befriended a family of cannibals (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), and several vengeful, ancient tribes (The Curse in the Jungle, The Ghosts of Camp Massacre, Terror on Tomahawk Island).
The Shivers books were light on iconic antagonists, however. There was no Slappy the Dummy, Monster Blood, etc, - but rather an army of generic ghosts, monsters, undead, supernatural forces, and murderers. All of which could be stopped by twelve-year-olds from broken homes. There were so many ghosts in these books that I felt that kid from Sixth Sense. Perhaps the only iconic villain was the troll. But he was ruined in his second appearance when was revealed he was actually a colonial era Brit straight off the set of a Mel Gibson film.
Ultimately, I think what I liked best about these books was the rad covers. They're really samey and also terribly written. Not terribly written for kids' books, but just plain bad. Here's how a typical Shivers line works: It was really really (for emphasis) (adjective). I was (adjective). Given that Spenser was a former journalist, it makes sense that he thought showing not telling was just something you did with your knob.
Spenser also regularly re-used the same plot of a fish-out-of-water kid moving to/visiting somewhere were horrible deaths had occurred, with said place now said to be haunted. You know, the sort of idiot plot which fuels slasher movies - i.e. teenagers going to fuck in the exact spot where years previously the murderous virgin killed others for doing the same.
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