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As of this writing, we are just a few days away from the release of Netflix's Fear Street: Prom Queen, the inbetweequel of the 2021 Fear Street horror trilogy. Based loosely on the Fear Street novels by R.L. Stine, the Fear Street movies have become a kind of modern-day Scream - predominantly slasher-focused meta horror centered around a couple of lovable teen protagonists. And with the success of the series about to be back in the news (hopefully!), it's worth taking a moment to consider that they might not have existed at all.

That is, if R.L. Stine pursued his original dream of writing comedy.

"I never planned to write scary books," Stine recently said in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch, "I was always funny rather than scary." (Longtime Popverse readers may remember Stine saying much the same thing in our interview with the author in 2022). Stine goes on to explain that, for a while, he was actually working as a literary comedian for Scholastic, under the name Jovial Bob Stine. 

But then, Jean Feiwel came to him with a problem.

Feiwel was the editorial director at Scholastic in 1987, and it was her that first put the idea of writing YA horror into Stine's brain. 

"She was angry at a guy who wrote teen horror and said she was never working with him again. She said to me, 'You could write good horror. Write a teen horror novel called Blind Date, [...] I wrote Blind Date and it came out a No. 1 bestseller. I'd never been on the list with my funny stuff before."

For a kind of writer who has, in his own words, "never said no to anything," that pop of success was just what Stine needed to purchase a one-way ticket onto the terror train. "I've been scary from then on," he tells his interviewer.

It would still be another two years before Stine began writing the Fear Street novels, and another two after that until he first published a book under the Goosebumps title, which put his name on the map. As a creepy kid myself, I suppose I owe a whole lot to Jean Feiwel and whichever idiot passed on the chance to write Blind Date. Then again, it's also kind of fun to think about the universe in which, this week, Netflix is producing a new comedy "based on the hit books by Jovial Bob Stine."

Fear Street: Prom Queen streams on Netflix May 23.

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A reading guide to Cassandar Clare's Shadowhunter Chronicles

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.