_blank_ said:
I would assume Chris likes Goosebumps the same reasons he like Sonic, Legos, and Transformers: it's something he liked as a kid and, refusing to grow up or at least refine his tastes, is adamant in saying he still reads Goosebumps. As for him reading any other books, Chris probably considering it reading if they were briefly mentioned in an episode of Family Guy.
As for
real scary stories for kids, did anyone else read these when they were growing up?
http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/artic ... 17.jpg?v=1
(Apologies if these were mentioned earlier in the thread)
Even though these were far better than
Goosebumps I have to admit that there are some stories in these that are pretty cheesy in retrospect (as a kid I always hated the jokey ones at the end and made up "scary" endings to them… I didn't want comedy in a book like this!). But they're fantastic for kids and the illustrations are of course timeless classics.
There was one scary stories for kids book I rented from the library but don't remember the name of. There were two stories that really stuck with me though:
-A boy invents a time machine in his basement. The machine transports you to the exact same place, only a certain amount of time in the past. The boy who created it wants to be cautious with using it but his friend can't wait, so one night she sneaks in and uses it without him. She wants to go some amount of time into the past, and she uses the machine. But the machine literally places her in the exact same space as the time machine is, meaning the earth has moved and is hundreds of thousands of miles away on its path of rotation. She realizes this in a fatal second and dies from the lack of air.
-A boy who is scared of the ocean stays with his grandpa and his grandpa takes him out deep sea fishing during a storm. There was one particular description the boy used about "the ocean so deep that the fish down there don't even need eyes" I still remember. When fishing the grandpa captures some fish with one eye that looks like an alien. When the boy asks what its name is, his grandpa replies that "it doesn't have a name". Eventually a gigantic whale-like monster rises from the sea, one of whose flippers was as large as a ship. I forgot exactly what happens next but basically the grandpa gets eaten and the boy has to float back to shore in a float.
Most of the other stories were lame though =/