I think most intelligent people can agree on the quality of someone's writing. What they can't do is judge the value a particular work has to someone else.

Yes, this, exactly - it's what I was trying to articulate and don''t seem to be able to. What I was looking for was whether P-C's use of the word "better" was based on his reaction as he first read them - presumably as an adolescent, which is their target audience - or on his more adult perspective looking back on them, which is more likely to be tinged with a critical eye.

And the one thing that seemed to jump out - with his emphasis - was the gut reaction to Pike's incorporating a beloved element into a cultural thing that P-C, for one, could personally resonate with. Everything else in there read like an adult perspective.

I remember when I was reading R. L. Stine's books as a kid, I liked them for a little while, but after awhile started to get kind of bored with them because there just weren't all that many different stories that he used -- although, when you're looking at what I'm guessing is at least 100 Fear Street books, where all of them have a premise of something along the lines of "supernatural presence of some sort terrorizes teenagers," and they all take place in the same small town, there probably is only a certain number you can read before most of the plots start seeming the same. I think the last ones of his that I read were the Fear Street Saga ones -- I'm not sure why I never went back to his other books after that, but I didn't. I don't know whether the getting bored with them was because they really were that repetitive or just that they didn't seem as cool at 12 as they had at 10.

I think I liked Christopher Pike a bit more just because he wasn't quite as repetitive -- he was more likely to put stories in other places or other times, so I didn't get the same feeling of knowing what was going to happen once I got through a few chapters. Also, Christopher Pike books gave me far more nights when I had to sleep with the light on.

what I'm guessing is at least 100 Fear Street books

Also, just to keep in mind (and unless I'm totally wrong) many of Stine's series books were eventually written by ghostwriters/packagers. He may have had input on storylines or helped to pick the ghostwriters, but he didn't actually write every single Goosebumps book.

Read both, and Stine wins out for me on memorability. It's been over a decade and the "Madelaine came to my house!" taunting of the Goode family ghost from one of the Fear Street Saga books still pops into my brain as cause of much of my insomnia in the fifth grade.

[insert segue here] one of my resolutions is to actually sell some writing this year as I'm too often roped into donating things to the new 'zines of friends and appearing in publications where I know the editors and I can't see where the nepotism ends and the integrity of my piece begins... Problem is I write a lot of slice of life humour and it seems there's no (paying that I've found anyway) market. Anyone aware of any humour-centered fiction mags that may have escaped my attention?

It feels like I'm living in some sort of bizarro world because the only writing success I've had lately is academic (read: the stuff I dredge through on autopilot) or ramblings in my lj. While the idea of getting a paper on Alfie (1966) vs Alfie (2004) published strikes me as pretty damn cool, it also seem damned hypocritical given my need to attack the ivory tower in every single paper I'm forced to write (even in the aforementioned one, in fact).

edited b/c I apparently have Gertrude, and not R.L. on the brain.

People wonder why genre fiction has increased its audience so much in recent years. It seems evident to me that literary fiction in the main has given up on story and it ceases to be about anything and is usually about itself...genre fiction...has always been about story." Lawrence Block

Block is my writing god. I like his "If it works, it works, stop fretting over it" attitude.

Also, Christopher Pike books gave me far more nights when I had to sleep with the light on.

Bing bing bing! Perfect adolescent gut reaction. "Dude - he SCARED me!"

I'm betting Pike did that, for P-C.

I'm betting Pike did that, for P-C.

I don't remember how often I was truly scared. I don't often get scared by books. There may have been a creep factor, though, and some of his were more mysteries than horror anyway.

I do love my discovery of Pike, though. It went like this.

In sixth grade, there was a book the chalkboard. Apparently, it had been lost, and it was left there for its owner to claim. Bury Me Deep, by Christopher Pike. The cover had a skeleton hand coming out of the ground, and the description on the back looked interesting. After a couple days went by with no one claiming it, I, uh, took it home and read it. I really liked it (not that it was his best or anything, but your first always holds a special place in your heart). When I returned it to the chalkboard the next day or so, I discovered its owner. He told me I could keep it. And thus my Pike-love was born.

My Stine story is that I tried to steal money from the big change bottle in our closet to buy Monster Blood from the book order.

'Salem's Lot creeped me out seriously. The kid laying in the upstairs room waiting for sunset, trying to get the ropes untied, then hearing the unhurried footsteps on the stairs. He's almost free when the door opens, and he knows if he turns to look he'll die.

Gah, I shivered just remembering it.

First horror book I remember reading was Shirley Jackson, Haunting of Hill House. I was about eleven. That's reading on my own, mind you; my evil family used to read me to sleep with Saki, Poe and Lovecraft.

Explains a few things....

'Salem's Lot creeped me out seriously.

My husband read 'Salem's Lot first, and for several nights he kept reading after I fell asleep, occasionally waking me up by saying, "Oh, shit!" I, of course, had to read it after that. I finished the book at about 3 a.m., and I really did get up and go to the refrigerator to make sure we had garlic in the house. Ah, Stephen King back when he was edited.

The first thing I remember really scaring me was a cheesy movie, "Journey to the Seventh Planet." My parents never took us to movies, and a girl in third or fourth grade took us all to the movies for her birthday.