Their parents literally cannot see what is going on. (Sometimes a beloved dog-Petey or Barky-accompanies them.) Thus displaced, they come under attack from some hallowed strain of low-budget weirdness-a witchy old woman, say, or a shuffling monster-of whose reality they have difficulty convincing their parents. Each about 120 pages long, and constructed (for the most part) according to the same horror-cheese specifications: Two kids, the narrator and his or her bratty younger sibling, are sent to a new school, or move to a new neighborhood, or visit their grandparents in a swamp. Ninety-three books in five years! The titles were glorious, a B-movie bonanza: Vampire Breath, Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes, Egg Monsters From Mars. Between 1992, when he inaugurated the franchise with Welcome to Dead House, and 1997, no fewer than 93 brightly colored Goosebumps books and spin-offs were published. The scale of Stine’s production-the Day-Glo sprawl of it, the trashy superfluity-is hard to get one’s head around. Goosebumps celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. But fourth grade-that’s the demographic bull’s-eye. Precocious second- or third-graders may be interested, as may fifth- or even sixth-graders with a retro sensibility. Goosebumps, the absurdly successful series under whose umbrella Why I Quit Zombie School appeared, is aimed without mercy at 9- and 10-year-olds. The leg cracked off, but the boy didn’t bleed.” Then again, it should be noted that his readership is in fourth grade. We do not find Stine, for example, describing his zombies as “muddle-minded and peckish.” He sketches in broader strokes: “Behind me, they grunted and groaned as they forced their dead legs forward.” Or: “No blood. It’s true that Why I Quit Zombie School does not perform at quite the level of Zone One. Stine (aka “Jovial Bob Stine”), who, over the course of his career, has sold more than 350 million books.

And in our excitement, we entirely failed to notice the publication of Why I Quit Zombie School, by R. We rejoiced, and reviewed Zone One very favorably some of us even bought ourselves a copy.

Brainy prose, the damned in hordes: Whitehead, a MacArthur genius, had dived dazzlingly off the parapet of highbrow and into a pile of zombies. It was Colson Whitehead who showed us the way last year, with his book Zone One, in which an armed-to-the-teeth narrator picks his way through zombie-toppled America, limpidly recalling the zombificent TV shows, the zombificent jobs, the general setting-in of obsolescence and undead vibes that preceded the actual zombie apocalypse. The tremulous laptop-tickler at your local Starbucks? Working on a zombie novel. Julian Barnes? Booker Prize–winning zombie novelist. I n the very, very near future, everyone-you, me, Barbara Kingsolver, V.

Terror na Bilbioteca by R.L. Stine