R. L. Stine (born Robert Lawrence Stine) is a prolific author of hundreds of scary books for young readers, earning him the nickname “the Stephen King of children’s literature” after the great horror novelist of books for adults. Stine credits his interest in penning horror stories to the Tales From the Crypt comic series published by EC Comics between 1950 and 1955, when Stine was the same age as many of his young protagonists. Stine began writing when he found a typewriter in his attic at age nine, and he typed both stories and jokes. Prior to writing horror, Stine wrote humor stories for children under the name Jovial Bob Stine. He also created the humor magazine Bananas, a publication aimed at teenagers and published by Scholastic Press for nine years, with 72 issues. Stine wrote his first horror novel, Blind Date, in 1986, and he also co-created and wrote for the Nickelodeon television series Eureeka’s Castle. From all this experience in the industry and with children’s literature, Stine created Parachute Press, the imprint under which Goosebumps was published from 1992 onward.