Point Horror

But it was books really.

Like the Scholastic Book Fair used to come around the schools and I'd see the Goosebumps books and the Point Horror books.

And I moved on to Stephen King when I was maybe like 14, 15.

I always find it really strange that my mum wouldn't let me watch horror movies, but didn't care what books I was reading.

...

there was a thing called Point Horror.

Did you have Point Horror?

I, not that I remember.

Nope.

...

it was, like, two or three, four years before Goosebumps became a thing.

There were these books called Point Horror, and they were way harder than Goosebumps.

So what if we did the same thing with our books? So they did that for horror books.

My favorite example is with Scholastic with Point Horror.

Genuinely, they didn't get writers to write these books for Point Horror.

They already had all these books under the Point imprint, which were horror books which were aimed at teenagers, and they decided to collect them all up.

They created from scratch the series Point Horror, and suddenly had all these dozens of books that they could sell to kids and say, "Hey, if you like scary books that are gory and creepy and have kids that are your age as the protagonists, this is for you." And they sold incredibly well.

Point Horror was very popular in its day.

So other publishers saw them doing this and decided to do the same thing, but when they didn't have enough of those books in the demographic, in order to sell to those demographics with that genre they would have them write series together.

But they would have them contract and say, "Hey, we want you to write three," or four, or six, or however many books, "for this contract.

yeah it could have been but that wasn't

it could have been like um do you ever used to read like the babysitter rl stein point horror

yes

and like she keeps getting babysitter one gets attacked like gets stalked babysitter two gets stalked babysitter three she's gone mental and was doing it to herself

Ooh.

Yeah.

I was more of a point horror girl.

I just like the

I was like, honey, is this your first day on the internet? Because I really don't have time for...

I... extreme purists because I feel like like it's that if you're not hitting all of these hoops you're like a bad person it's like no can we just stop the transphobes and you know the people committing genocide please can we just maybe focus on that like not everybody's perfect and to expect perfection is like you're just pushing failure like god damn it it's just it feels so performative to me as well it's not no I'm gonna stop but for reading very I I love point horror like I haven't read anything that made me feel the way that point horror made me feel as a teenager like I love um I love a proper like a And every time I try and look one up, it's always like, there's like spooky fantasy things.

And I'm like, no, no, no, I want a reasonable horror, like make it good horror.

make me panic when the door opens.

Like, I just don't want a little bit of that, you know? So I would like recommendations on that.

And if you haven't read Point Horror, my favourite Point Horror is The Boyfriend because every time I think about it, I smell soap.

Like, proper soapy soap.

Like, you know? Like, proper soap.

And she was probably reading The Fear Street.

So she would have been reading some R.L. Stine, but it would have all been like pulled together in like the Point Horror series and stuff like that.

And so goosebumps when that came out, Carmen was like, they're lame.

And so immediately I was like – they're lame so while everybody else got to go through the whole like goosebumps bonanza and like I know friends who had subscriptions and got them every week I was trying to be cool and trying to read all of her um point horror books never delved into her king books but I tried to read a lot of her point horror books and I really loved oh yeah

I'm glad you brought up Point Horror because I was born in like 89.

So I was like too young really for the original Goosebumps.

But when I was like 9, 10, I distinctly remember thinking there was like a war between Point Horror and Goosebumps.

You know, like there was like you either were one or the