Like 'Goosebumps?' Here's Another 30 Years' Worth Of Horror For Kids

In the early '90s, scarring kids for life became big business. R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike became brand name industries, minting money and traumatizing children. Stine had his Fear Street and Goosebumps series, while Pike turned out a seemingly endless line of young adult novels about teenagers killing teenagers, ancient dinosaurs disguised as teenagers killing teenagers, ghost teenagers killing non-ghost teenagers, and Greek gods reincarnated as teenagers killing teenagers. But this was simply the final development in decades of YA horror.

YA's Stone Age existed for thirty years — from 1967, when S.E. Hinton's gained mainstream critical respectability, to 1997 when J.K. Rowling's sparked a YA gold rush. During those intervening decades, horror for teenagers fell into three main categories. For the kid who wanted realism, there was social horror like the druggy, doom-laden or Richard Peck's claustrophobic rape novel, Kids who wanted fewer abortions and drug overdoses but more mystery could read the hiking thriller , or , a throwback to 18th century gothic novels, in which the ghosts haunting an African American family's new home turn out to be their terrible next door neighbors trying to drive them away.