Weren't most of the Goosebumps titles ghostwritten? Some of them were decent reads, I guess. I was never really into them. It's hard to create a scary story when it's pretty much understood from the get go that nobody is actually going to die.

It's wierd how almost everybody wants to shelter kids from violence. The standard riposte to the notion that kids are being exposed to too much sex is that nobody complains when they're exposed to violence. When I was a kid, I loved the ninja turtles, just like any other kid, but I preferred the Eastman & Laird comics that my dad would read to us at bedtime to the TV show. Why? Because they were more intelligent, gritty, and realistic than the "kid-friendly" version we were being sold. Perhaps if kids' entertainment was less tame, they wouldn't crave adult entertainment so much.