Shortly befor I quit my old, terrible job at the deli, one of the more idiotic newer workers tried to insult me by saying, "I bet you like this song," when a pop song was plaing on the store's speakers.
"Who is it?" I said.
He looked crushed. "Justin Beiber."
I didn't know it at the time but for the first and only time in my life I said the right thing: "Oh, I can't tell one of these young singers from another."
The jerk looked apoplectic, stormed away, and never spoke to me again.
One of my few good days at the deli.
I've noticed that some horror fans look at R.L. Stine as the jerk from the deli looked at Justin Beiber. Is this fair? Until today, I never read anything by R.L. Stine so I couldn't say if that was fair.
After reading "The Spell," while I have a small sample of Stine's body of work, I don't think that's fair at all (now I know Justin Beiber's "Baby" because Weird Al parodied it--frankly, it's no dumber than The Archies' "Sugar, Sugar," one of the biggest songs of the 60s).
In Stine's story, a group of teenagers offend a blossoming hypnotist, and taste his disproportionate revenge.
I was surprised that the story featured a bloody murder and a not-so-happy ending. One of the few common threads linking stories in this anthology is a lack of upbeat endings but Stine's is among the grimmest.
The imagery wasn't as gory as many writers would have made it but I did like many of the details. Stine is from Columbus, and peppered the story with Ohio-centric touches (attention, Tobias S. Buckell--Stine was born in Ohio but escaped, not the other way around!) The murder weapon was a bat allegedly once owned by Pete Rose--now Pete's name is associated with crime and wrong-doing!
I was reminded of Stephen King's "I Know What You Need" in which a similar character manipulates his peers, but through actual magic, not hypnosis. King also featured a female protagonist who learned her boyfriend was controlling her thoughts, but in King's story, she breaks his spell. With Stine, the story ends before the protagonist meets her end, but the villain looks like he won.
King's story, from what I remember, was more sexual but his characters were older. With King, the chief murder is committed with what was essentially a voodoo doll for a car, while Stine's is more visceral--bashing the victim's brains out with a bat.
One huge advantage of "I Know What You Need" has over "The Spell" is that King maintained the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and many other writers of naming books of magic. King blended fictitious books like The Necronomicon with real ones such as James Frazer's The Golden Bough. William, the budding hypnotist, is said to be studying various books of mind control but the reader never learns their titles. That was a missed opportunity for Stine.
Stine was writing to a younger audience but I don't see that as a negative. Again, I am by no means an authority on Stine--I've read one of hia hundreds of stories--but I don't understand some of the nasty comments I've seen.
I don't see anything brave or imaginative in being a contradictorian--I think Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Poe are great writers; Uwe Boll and Stephanie Meyer, not so much. Based on one story, I'm not sure why he's sold between 100 million and 400 million books, but he doesn't deserve the hate thrown at him.
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