TL;DR, I’m reading Goosebumps books and listening to some relevant podcasts that I can recommend to other readers.
I started reading the Goosebumps books and just kinda blazing through them since each one can be read in less than two hours. They’re fun reads, but since I’ll likely never read these again I wanted to support my readings with additional materials to help it all stick before I move on.
It started by doing the thing where I search for a lot of relevant information and references in the usual wikis but then realized, oh, there’s surely a podcast for that.
(There are many.)
(Never mind the video essays and reviews on YouTube, I’m not even going to start down that rabbit hole.)
I listened to various episodes and wasn’t kind finding everything I wanted in a single podcast (some comedy, some plot exploration, some reading too far into texts designed for children), so I decided to choose three podcasts and listen to each show’s episodes for a given book as trios of roundtable discussions and lectures on the works of R.L. Stine. It was also important to me that the podcast actually covers the core 62 books in the original series because I’m a completionist (to a point), and these do!
Also, these are all podcasts about children’s books but very much meant for adults. So, you know, parents may wanna find other ways to chat with their kids about the crusty old Goosebumps books they grew up with.
These are the podcasts I have in rotation and the order in which I listen to them after I finish reading a Goosebumps book.
#1 – Goosebumps: Welcome to Deadcast
Hosted by twin brothers and Goosebumps megafans, I like this show for the comedic stylings of the hosts, their clear love of the Goosebumps series, and perhaps most importantly the fact that they do the play-by-play breakdown of the plot as a core part of each episode. That makes it a good first episode to get reminded of what actually happens in the story. Bonus: they always talk about the TV episode adapted from the book (if there was an episode), something the other podcasts only occasionally brush against in their discussions of the stories.
#2 – Goosebuds
This is the run-of-the-mill podcast experience. The hosts are three straight white men (in fact all of these shows are hosted by white Americans, which bums me out but I couldn’t find podcasts with more varied host backgrounds), they are all performers or writers working in TV, and they love to veer off into tangents unrelated to the Goosebumps book they’re discussing in the episode. One gets the sense that they feel there’s not enough meat on the bones of just talking about the books so they improv for a while to pad out the runtime. That said, they’re funny guys, and I like to listen to their takes on these books just for the chuckles. But I’d say this podcast is skippable for anyone who doesn’t wanna cram this much Goosebumps material into their brains. Also, early episodes of the podcast are during the Obama presidency when it was seemingly alright to joke about eugenics and culling people, which, yikes. Listener beware.
#3 – Say Podcast and Die!
This newer show may be my favorite after listening to twenty episodes or so of each podcast. The hosts self-describe as queer and are both funny and keep the tone light, but they are also educators and approach the discussion of each book almost like a class lecture, asking each other questions in order to draw out more thoughts and theories on what was going through R.L. Stine’s brain or what aspects of the real world may have informed the choices in the text. Initially, it really felt like a classroom setting where I was being asked questions and didn’t have answers, but I’ve grown to appreciate these hosts’ more critical analysis of the stories. I save these episodes for last so that I come away from the experience of having read a Goosebumps book with bigger questions and analysis than I would otherwise develop by simply reading the book and moving on.